Thirty-one hours without a network, and not one reading lost

The ice started around four in the afternoon. By nine, the trees along the county road were coming down under the weight of it, and one of them took the fiber line that connects the hospital to everything outside it. The phones went to the backup line. The internet did not come back for thirty-one hours.

The hospital has twenty-five beds, an emergency department, and a staff that knows most of its patients by first name. That night it had eighteen inpatients, three of them on continuous monitoring, and a pharmacy refrigerator full of insulin, vaccines and two doses of a medicine that costs more than the car Ellen Marsh drives.

Ellen is a respiratory therapist and the hospital's unofficial technology person, which in a hospital this size means she is the one people call when a monitor says something strange. She was on shift when the line went down.

What stopped, and what did not

The electronic record stopped. It runs at the health system's data center two hundred miles away, and without the line, it was unreachable. The staff went to paper, which they practice twice a year and did not enjoy.

The monitoring did not stop. The hospital had replaced its patient telemetry and its environmental monitoring with Fieldmesh the year before. The gateways kept receiving from every device on the floor. With nowhere to send the data, they stored it, each reading with the time it was taken.

"The nurses could still see the monitors at the bedside and at the station," Ellen says. "What I was worried about was afterwards. Thirty hours of vital signs that exist only on paper is thirty hours of a chart that's going to be wrong forever."

The refrigerator

At around two in the morning, the generator transfer switch hiccupped and the pharmacy refrigerator lost power for about four minutes. The Fieldmesh sensor inside it recorded the temperature rising by just under a degree and falling back. The gateway raised the alarm locally at the nurses' station, which is the part that does not depend on any network at all.

Normally the next question would have been the expensive one: was the stock still good? Usually, with a gap in the logger record, the answer is to throw it away. This time the record had no gap. The pharmacist checked it the next morning, saw a four-minute rise of 0.9 degrees, well within range, and kept every dose.

When the line came back

At four in the morning on the second day, a utility crew spliced the fiber. Within a few minutes, the gateways began reconciling: sending thirty-one hours of stored readings to the record, in order, each with its original timestamp and a flag saying it had been delayed.

The nurses still had to enter their paper notes. That took two days and some grumbling. But the vital signs were already there, in the right place and at the right times, and the gaps in the chart that everyone expected were not there.

What they changed afterwards

Not much, which Ellen says is the point. The hospital added a second Fieldmesh gateway to the pharmacy so that the refrigerator alarms do not depend on a single unit, and it moved its downtime drill to January, when the next storm is most likely.

"Everyone remembers the night the network went down," she says. "Nobody remembers it as the night we lost the data. That's the best outcome I can think of."

Nexaform Labs is a fictional company. The people, places and figures in this story are invented for demonstration.