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Welcome to Electronic Paper

  • Welcome to Electronic Paper. This is a new weblog by Edward Vielmetti to explore some of the ideas behind a stream of news and creativity that come from the collision between the world of computers and the world of paper.

    More and more of our lives - our reading, our writing, our newspapers, our electronic medical records, our voting, our grocery lists and holiday cards and indie zines and baby photos - are starting out electronic and staying electronic. As we rush headlong to digitize I wonder what we are losing in the process. How many people struggle with keeping up with their email when a simple paper postcard once in a while would make more of an impact?

    This blog will be explore the collision of the paper and electronic worlds, where they intersect happily and where they fight madly. I'm turning on a blog search for "electronic and paper" and will comment on what flies past, just to build a baseline. The other thing which I'll try for is a stream of scans of interesting paper artifacts, showing things that were done better (or at least differently) in another era.

    Welcome for the ride! Do you have a paper ticket or an electronic ticket?
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« November 2005 | Main | April 2007 »

Electronic medical records scorched in UK fire

from RISKS Digest 24.13:

Date: Sat, 17 Dec 2005 17:12:37 +0000 (GMT)
From: Pete Mellor <pm@csr.city.ac.uk>
Subject: Oil blaze hits hospital systems

The explosion and fire at the fuel depot near Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire:
http://images.thetimes.co.uk/TGD/picture/0,,250768,00.jpg

Connection with computers? Well, several nearby installations were wrecked (amazingly, no-one was seriously injured), one of which contained the electronic patient records of Addenbrooke's Hospital, Cambridge. The hospital reported that it would have to rely on paper records for several days until the computer files could be restored.

On the positive side, at least they had back-up. On the other hand, their disaster recovery planning seems to be a bit slack.

Peter Mellor, Centre for Software Reliability, City University, London EC1V 0HB
+44 (0)20 7040 8422 Pete Mellor <p.mellor@csr.city.ac.uk>

Add this to your planning for electronic records - how are your backup systems?

December 28, 2005 in Electronic medical records | | Comments (0)