I think the parent's point was that most medical staff (in my experience) use normal wall clocks to track time. I've never seen a per-patient stopwatch.
I guess I'm naively assuming that there is some sort of patient management software which keeps track of what needs to happen when for whom, to enable things like shift changes without losing information. But I definitely don't have any idea how this part of the medical world actually functions.
The main complaint I've heard about EMR in the US is that it massively increased the bookkeeping overhead that staff had to deal with. Particularly since it tends to fall in the realm of "terrible enterprise software no one asked the users for opinions on."
Some kind of punch clock system for every action would make that even more tedious, I imagine.
Such a system would be extremely disruptive to nursing staff- it may work well with robots though. Most hospitals track care on patients chart, which is computerized, but boils down to free-form text[1] that relies on humans interpreting,executing and updating the chart.
1. Patient care is very bespoke, with all manner of combinations for treatments, including contra-indicated medications. It's similar to why it's hard to automate air traffic control (lot's of human factors at play that require human decision making).
To err is human. Until we develop a language that is perfectly unambiguous,all we can do for now is minimize chances of miscommunication. To continue on the air traffic comparison, sometimes the pilots land on the taxiway[1] despite clear instructions
To err is human, but the solution in that case is to replace human judgment with technology
> Federal officials subsequently issued new rules for nighttime landings and control-tower staffing. Now, when an adjacent runway is shut down at night, air traffic controllers will no longer let pilots make so-called visual approaches to land. Instead, they must use instrument landing systems or satellite-based systems to line up for the correct runway.
Not sure this supports that "unambiguous language" is the problem. To me it sounds like the problem is "humans being expected to perfectly perform routine tasks" - and the solution is to move as much of the task away from the humans as possible. I imagine there are parallels in the medical system (but am not expert).
The big problem with that is you don't know if someone has done the time adjustment. Eg you know there's a handyman who does this twice a year, perhaps he's done it before the 2am official cutover time because his shift ended earlier? Or he'll do it the next morning?
Similarly it's not obvious whether your phone keeps an eye on this for you, if you're not a techie type. And if you are, how do you know what your elapsed time stopwatch does under the hood?
One of my cars gets time from the radio, the other one doesn't, so around this time of year they show different times.
