The demands on Healthcare information systems are growing at an ever quickening pace.
The functions and procedures in a Hospital or Healthcare Network are becoming more time critical. With increased Government and Organizational Regulations and Standards, time is beginning to play a crucial role in compliance, as well as quality of patient care. Regulations such as HIPAA and FDA 21 CFR Part 11, require accurate time, authentication and increased security. Organizations such as HL7, IHE, and HITSP are laying the groundwork for the requirement of accurate time in their standards.
Time synchronization allows networks, workstations, electronic health records (EHRs), cardiology equipment and other medical devices to display and provide legally traceable time, so that there is a true snapshot of timed procedures and events.
Providing accurate time is important for many reasons. Networked devices operate efficiently and provide an official time for:
- Document creation/alteration
- Security events
- Medical emergencies
- Accurate time-of-death
Secondly, time, when synchronized, allows for increased technical interoperability of programs and devices so they may function more efficiently.
By providing official, synchronized time across a facility, reliability of authentication, security programs and systems and overall efficiency is improved. The risk of a lawsuit associated with a timed issue is decreased when there is a system in place to provide official, UTC time.
How To Sync Your Healthcare Network
The best way to synchronize time is through the use of a GPS enabled NTP Time Server Master Clock. Our hardware time server provides Legally Traceable Time® with traceability to official UTC (Coordinated Universal Time). Through this official time, time stamp and audit trails are able to provide legal documentation of transactions and events traceable back legal standards. In the event that a medical record or hospital event is ever subpoenaed in a court of law, the time stamping tracing back to a dedicated master clock or time server is legally verifiable.
In addition to synchronizing network devices, our time server can be used to synchronize other devices so the time is the same as the network. Serial time codes, alarms, event relays and an add-on radio transmitter for synchronizing facility clocks, can provide legal time to other time-sensitive devices.