Welcome, to R.E. Greiner's website for Year 2000 compliance. R.E. Greiner Consulting specializes in Contingency Planning and Risk Assessment for its "readiness" in the approaching millenium. Below R.E. Greiner Consulting has taken the time to explain the "Y2K Bug" further.
Do you have visions of something going wrong inside your computer? Some techno bug that bumps a resistor here, shorts a memory chip there, eats data off your hard drive, tells lies to your software and leaves!
The y2k bug and its fix is the biggest technical challenge of this end of the century. In terms of resources, both human and monetary, it is bigger than the space program. So it seems hard to believe that the cause of all this stems from early computer programmers' failure to identify the year as a 4 digit number. In the interest of saving a couple of bytes of memory, they programmed computers to accept a 2 digit value for the year and gave them the power to infer what century it is. The catch is, programmers never told the computer about the 21st century (year 2000 and beyond).
For all you Mac users out there. OK, OK... you got it right on this one. The good news for Mac users is that your hardware and operating system is y2k compliant - meaning your computers understand the year 2000 but be careful later in the century. The not so good news is that you may still have software and application problems.
Taking the Healthcare Industry as a prime example for Year 2000 compliance.
R.E. Greiner Consulting Company has given a representative view of what aspects
might want to be looked at when considering a hospital, HMO, or any other healthcare
facility.
MEDICAL DEVICES and HOSPITAL SYSTEMS:
Computer-augmented devices are in hospitals all across the country. They
are comprised with flashing lights, display screens, digital read-outs, and audible
"beeps", these bedside monitors indicate and display everything from a patient's
heartbeat, blood pressure, temperature, and many other vital statistics. Most
importantly, these indicators monitor an individual's acceptable tolerance levels.
If an indicator goes above/below a threshold, medication can be automatically
administered through an IV; if the indicator goes beyond all acceptable ranges
than an alarm is sounded.
Whether it is a CAT scan, or an MRI, they're all computer controlled, or computer augmented. In many cases, they would not function if the computer were to shut down.
That brings us to the ULTIMATE question(s):
1. Could your systems break come the Year 2000?
2. What is your particular organization's vulnerablility?
3. How should I address these vulnerable areas and find
out what potential pitfalls may occur.
These are only a couple questions that may be asked when assessing Year 2000
procedures. R.E. Greiner Consulting can not only give you other questions to
keep in mind, but can help you alleviate these systematic procedures.
We look forward to working with you. See you in the year 2000!!
If you have any questions that need to be addressed contact us at:
The Year 2000 is right around the corner. Don't wait until its too late.
