Because they’re more expensive. They’re all not “equally good,” they’re good enough to keep people alive. (You repurpose resources from elective and billing procedures, et cetera.)
I would expect them to be good enough to prevent "obvious" deaths-from-failed-procedures, but deliver a slightly lower quality of care, so that if out of 100 very seriously ill people 50 survived during normal operation, this would turn into e.g. 49.
All of this without the person obviously dying due to the alternative procedures - just e.g. the doctor saw the patient less often and didn't notice some condition as early as they would have under normal procedures.
Would you consider this assumption to be wrong? (I am a layperson, not familiar with how hospitals work except from being a patient.)
What resources are you repurposing from elective procedures exactly? Your patient load hasn’t changed, and day surgical instruments and supplies are from the same pool. There’s no “well this pile of equipment is only for elective procedures”.
I’m not even sure what “billing procedures you’d repurpose (especially in your context of “keeping people alive”).
> The outage didn’t change any of these things either.
Never said that it did. I just don't think your idea of emergency downtime procedures at a hospital are what they are. There's paper and offline charting, most meds can be retrieved similarly, and so on. I heard a claim (from someone here) that an ER was unable to do CPR due to the outage, which could not be remotely true. Crash carts are available and are specifically set up to not require anything else but a combination. Drugs, IV/IO access, etc.
> At Mount Sinai, billing staff were redirected to watch newborn babies.
That sounds like something I would have imagined security doing. To be clear, what they most likely meant here is in the sense of "avoiding abduction of a newborn", not any kind of access to observe and oversee neonates.
