Saturday, August 4, 2012

Reliable Computing for Health Care

By Allyson Westcot


In the health-care field, laptops on ambulances must be able to handle jarring, shocks, drops, varying climate conditions and more. Recently, a central Missouri ambulance district decided to go from paper to the Panasonic Tough Book 18 to streamline operations and help guarantee more correct recordkeeping. They recently underwent an upgrade to the Toughbook 19. After this switch, one of their ambulances had technical problems on to the way to the location of a car crash. A fire broke out underneath the ambulance. The fire swiftly spread to both the passenger compartment and the engine.

One of the team members had been utilizing the notebook shortly before that, and had some unfinished work left on it. After the fire was put out by local firefighters, that team member retrieved the laptop. He thought it had to be a one hundred percent loss. It was dripping wet, and the case was cracked and softened in places because of the intense heat of the fire. But he turned it on and found it in working order.

That sort of reliabilityĆ¢€"in circumstances beyond what anyone would expect an any PC to handleĆ¢€"is the kind of reliability health care workers have to have. Disaster response workers and other emergency workers need to be able to count on their hardware.

A few years before the switch, the team had already learned the value of sturdy computers. A team member left the laptop on the bumper of an ambulance after cleaning the interior of the auto. The laptop PC stayed in place during about an hour of driving in a thunderstorm. Doused and dirty from the drive, the laptop still worked as well as it had before the trip.

When info needs to be conveyed now, with no glitches or hang-ups due to a crashing laptop, sturdy computers are critical pieces of equipment to have available.




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