Humans vs Computers by Gojko Adzic

Author:Gojko Adzic [Adzic, Gojko]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: leanpub.com
Published: 2017-09-01T04:00:00+00:00

The Grand Rapids massacre

The days between Christmas and New Year’s Day are, for most people on the planet, a period of joy and celebration. For medical emergency services, though, this is one of the busiest times of the year. Partying too hard mostly leads to bad hangovers, but the period also marks a sharp increase in accidents and fatalities. Still, the sheer scale of deaths in Grand Rapids, USA, in 2003 surprised everyone. During the Christmas holidays that year, more than 8500 people were declared dead in the St Mary’s Mercy Medical Center, in an unexplained epidemic that cost the city of Grand Rapids almost 5% of its population. One of the casualties was Cathy Uhl, a 55-year-old administrative supervisor at the Grand Rapids Press. When the postman delivered Uhl’s final medical bill on 2 January, she was quite shocked to learn that she had, in fact, been dead for a while.

After a ‘routine’ upgrade of the record management system at the hospital, the computers dropped one digit from the code indicating that a patient had been discharged home. Instead, everyone who’d visited the hospital between October and December the previous year was marked as deceased. Jennifer Cammenga, a spokesperson for the hospital, attributed the problem to a simple mapping error, but it’s questionable whether she could be trusted. After all, according to hospital records, Cammenga was among the walking dead.

The computer glitch didn’t just stop at sending wrong medical bills. By virtue of everything being connected to everything else these days, the hospital systems also directly notified computers at several other organisations, including the government. Connected medical insurance companies started taking people off their registers. Roughly 2800 Medicare accounts were at risk, because insurers might have refused to cover additional bills after a person had (wrongly) been given a date of death.

Software teams often test upgrades on a small idealistic data sample. But the real world is messy, inconsistent and full of weird cases that fall outside the norm. That’s why a routine upgrade can mess up important information or remove it by mistake. Problems with legacy data get even worse when software is replaced rather than upgraded. Years of undocumented glitches and workarounds embedded in the old system get thrown away. However, the old data sticks around, and the new system often isn’t ready to deal with all the peculiarities.

When the Blue Cross insurance company in North Carolina moved 500,000 customers from a 15-year-old system to new software in January 2016, its call centre was overwhelmed by confused clients. Among the people participating in the 500% increase in call volume were Jim and Kathy Kluth. They’d switched to a joint insurance plan a month before the data upgrade. The Kluths received three different insurance ID numbers. Blue Cross incorrectly debited both the new and the old plan premium from their bank account, requiring Jim and Kathy to spend 12 hours on the phone with the insurer to get the money back. Beth Anne Corriveau received an insurance policy covering the year 2199.

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