losing backup, the terror

I was told by the EDP department staff that I need to add new floor to the pharmacy slip conversion program 1+ weeks ago. The hospital billing program is based on Oracle database and the system had nothing much to do with my program initially. But later I had requested the company to provide me with a “view” to read in the in patient data(bedno, chartno, name, sex…etc..) and the linkage had started since then. “View” after “view” were provided and linkage was only limited at the my program reading the “view”level. Upon the completion of ED triage program, the management had requested the computer company to read from the access database used by my program and after couple of months of effort, it was materialized.

At the end of last year, the hospital decided to upgrade the pharmacy dispensing system(enabling a 200k+/month payoff from the insurance company). The work load of the pharmacy had increased and they had refused to proceed with the billing process. The billing process required a staff to enter the drug prescribed in the ward into the billing system. To avoid error of data entry resulting in dispensing error, the staff will need a good knowledge of drug.

I usually do my programming work on the ED physician’s desk computer. My work was mostly done in between consultation/waiting for data, thence it was not my personal computer and I had to share it with some other guys. It is a Celeron 2.4GHz with 2GB ram running XP. I started with VB 2005 express then shifted to VB2008…I had the 2010 version install but did not imported my program. With this fossil type of equipment and software, I am still able to maintain the system…

After few years of doing the job, I had set up a backup procedure… I use to backup the whole project folder to a folder (which can be seen by me only over the intranet).

I had started this procedure about 14 months ago when I had lost the ED triage project file. I had just accidentally copy an earlier version over the latest working folder…. The published version was ver.18 but I had only the ver.13 project folder with me… It took me 2 weeks to rebuild the whole project and updated it to ver.18… I hack and hack and hack during the rebuild. The worst part was that, I had no idea what I had done between the upgrade…

When I called up the program and I found that I was in the same crisis 14 months ago. Well, my mistake and I had to re-do the program again but thank to grace of the LORD, I knew what I had done and it was “up to date “ again in few hours…

It was a warning and I think I had to write a auto backup program....