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et2o | 1 year ago

You have no idea how a hospital or modern medicine works. It needs to be online.

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freehorse|1 year ago

Why would a machine that is required for a MRI machine to work (as one of the examples given in the thread here) need to be online? I understand about logging, though even then I think it is too risky. Do all these machines _really_ need to be online, or just nobody bothered after all the times something happened or, even worse, software companies profit in certain ways and would not want to change their models? Can we imagine no other way to do things apart from connecting everything to some server wherever that is?

kanonade|1 year ago

MRI read outs are 3d, so can't be printed for analysis. They are gigabytes in size, and the units are usually in a different part of the building. So you could sneakernet cds every time an MRI is done, then sneakernet the results back. Or you could batch it and then analysis is done slowly and all at once. OR you could connect it to a central server and results/analysis can be available instantly.

Smarter people than us have already thought through this and the cost-benefit analysis said "connect it to a server"

compiler-guy|1 year ago

You don’t print the images an MRI produced, you transmit them to the people who can interpret them, and they are almost never in the same room as the big machine, and sometimes they need to be called up in a different office altogether.

jmcgough|1 year ago

Our critical devices were fine. But epic and all of our machines were down. How do you transmit radiology images without epic?

rsync|1 year ago

"It needs to be online."

No, it doesn't.

Some have chosen - for reasons of efficiency and scale and cost - to place it online.

However, this is a trade-off for fragility.

It's not insane to make this trade-off ...

... but it is insane to not realize one is making it.