In case your personal system goes down in 2000 you'll be relieved to know the folks over at the King Edward VII Memorial Hospital believe they have things under control in purging the Millennium Bug out of their equipment.

No one will argue, unless they live a charmed life, that ensuring medical equipment and facilities still continue to function when 1999 turns to 2000 is not a critical issue. In some cases equipment failure is a matter of life and death, and in this case we're trusting the technicians and their administrators have got it right.

Take the example of Scott and White Hospital in Temple, Texas which found problems in anaesthesia monitors, and fetal monitors. Other hospitals in the US have found infusion pumps in intravenous drips, heart defibrillators, pacemaker and intensive care monitors, CAT scans, dialysis, chemotherapy and radiation equipment. Whoa! You say.

Over at the King Eddie, manager of information systems Richard Lau said the hospital had the foresight to begin its Year 2000 programme 18 months ago.

That's because its major software supplier, Shared Medical Systems (SMS), is now beginning to feel the pressure on its resources from hospitals in the US that are beginning to realise they'd better get moving on dealing with the Year 2000 bug.

"We jumped ahead of the crowd,'' Mr. Lau said. "Even now we're having difficulty getting them to keep people here in Bermuda.

This is the kind of situation companies are predicted to face as 2000 draws closer. The competition for scarce resources -- computer technicians and programmers especially -- will become more intense as the pressure comes to bear on executives.

"We have our resources secured,'' Mr. Lau said. "It had a lot to do with the hospital pushing the vendor. We started the process early on with SMS while a lot of US hospitals were sitting back. According to SMS we are quite far ahead of most US hospitals. We are pretty confident that critical systems will be ready.

The hospital plans on being compliant with all the major hospital systems by March 1999. Mr. Lau reports to a committee set up to deal with the Year 2000 problem and which brings together people from all departments within the hospital. Kapyna Rabain chairs the Year 2000 committee. The committee in turn reports to the Hospital Board.

The first task the committee did was make an inventory of all potential systems, especially critical ones like heart monitors and respirators, where a computer chip could cause a problem or a shutdown.

The hospital also wrote off all the vendors requesting reports on how compliant those systems and machines were and what upgrades were available.

Since last year the hospital had hired a part-time person specifically devoted to dealing with the Year 2000 problem. As of October that job became a full time position.

Of course patient equipment is the main priority. Most of the patient equipment has since been certified and tested. The hospital did find Year 2000 problems with some of the equipment. That equipment has either been replaced or upgraded. In many cases the equipment was due for replacement anyway.

"We are now going back again to make sure we didn't miss anything in our audit,'' Mr. Lau said. "We are now starting to look at our major suppliers like Belco and Telco and drawing up contingency plans in case anything goes wrong.

The hospital has also been deciding what kind of supplies it will need to stock up on if necessary.

"If we need them we will stockpile,'' Mr. Lau said.

Next year the hospital's accountants, Butterfield & Steinhoff (KPMG), will also review the institution's Year 2000 plans and report back. That's the state of technology in medicine going into the next year.

Just how problematic the Year 2000 problem can be was driven home with the news this week of the discovery of bugs in Windows 98, called the most tested piece of software in history. If Microsoft can't get it right, then we should really depend on all the testing and claims of compliancy elsewhere. We have no choice, really, but to depend on the claims. There is only so much the best intentioned companies can do, but it does make one pause to think about what is escaping all this testing. The bugs won't stop the program from operating or cause data from being lost according to a Press release from the company.

Microsoft has posted a software update on its Web site (microsoft.com). Among the problems is if the computer is starion of a second when the date changes to January 1, 2000 the computer's system clock could display the wrong time or date.