Medical devices A ticking time-bomb

This is interesting because at least one of our medical instruments runs on Windows Embedded and as part of the OS customization process, we turn off the "sync to time server" feature. The time is set during installation, and unless a customer or a service engineer notices something wrong, never touched again.

Why do we do this? Well, because we run into the same problem everyone else who wants to sync to a time server in a lab or hospital does: the hospital's IT people don't want anything on their network that isn't absolutely required to be there.

Clinical IT is understandably suspicious of anything on their network, but it will take cooperation on all sides before anything changes in this arena.

FDA requirements for electronic data transmission (21 CFR Part 11) are a hassle to implement even for devices starting from a blank slate. That being said the sooner NTP standards are universally required, the better. As the article mentions it will be very resource-intensive to retrofit devices for this standardization - an EMR consultant's dream project.

Once again, the complexities of coding using time-related concepts rears its ugly head. There should be standards for time synchronization and tracking. All medical data should be timestamped to a global uniform standard like GMT.