Hi. Written EMRs and built medical devices (10-12 years exp between them). In many cases messages from devices and external systems are processed asynchronously

Hi. Written EMRs and built medical devices (10-12 years exp between them). In many cases messages from devices and external systems are processed asynchronously, so there isn't much choice but to trust remote timestamps.. I may be getting data minutes or hours later. Just a distributed system challenge. The time zone issue is a human one. Historically clinicians schedule doses at "Every 3 hours" or "Once per day, 8am". Humans figure out what that means, but a dose scheduling system that shifts 8am an hour after daylight savings (because it interpreted the schedule as "every 24 hours" is going to run aground with nurses when it tells them they're late). However, every 3 hours is pretty obviously an interval and likely shouldn't shift by 30% of the interval! This isn't a distinction that clinicians are used to making, but as someone who had to write some of the first dose-scheduling systems focused on clinical accuracy, we ran into this challenge and did a lot of thinking about which schedules really meant 'intervals' of specific units of time and which ones meant 'due at these calendar times every day'. It's an interesting example of a problem that introducing technology introduces/exposes while showing up to fix other things.