EBME Forums Forums Maintenance Technical Assistance Siemens Unity Systems - Anyone else using these?

Does anyone else out there have any dealings with these audiometer systems? Could you have found a solution to our problem identified below?

Our audiologists have a lot of trouble with the computers they are using to drive these systems, and despite several service visits the answer has still not been found.

We suspect that Windows is failing to co-ordinate with Practice Navigator - the Siemens patient data system - properly. The result is that a series of escallating errors come on screen when the staff try to save a session, terminating in the worst cases in a full-on "blue screen of death" crash. This loses all the session data, essentially wasting a 45 minute consultation every time it happens.

Siemens suggested at first that perhaps the elderly hard-drives were to blame, but some have been replaced and it has not made a difference. It was worth a try, because they were sufficiently old that it was likely; it's just unfortunate that it didn't help!

With the national target of reducing all audiology waiting lists to less than fifteen (?ICBW) weeks looming, this is not doing much for anyone's karma...

Any advice would be much appreciated. Thanks guys.

We have five of these and am unaware of any major problems. Why not send your request directly to lesley.smith@borders.scot.nhs.uk. Lesley is the Chief Audiology Technician here.
Graham

Thanks! I'll give it a go. This is exactly the sort of info I was after. The staff in Audiology are feeling quite isolated - they are getting the message that they are the "only ones" who have this problem, but if it is really Windows that is causing the problem, then it should be happening at more than this one site.

If anyone else has any help or advice, please speak up.

BTW - a related issue - has anyone had the Kaspersky anti-virus type software conflict with any specialist medical software? This also started trouble with the Siemens software, resulting in us having to train it not to attack the anti-virus bits of Practice Navigator.

The day has now come where computers are trying to take control of things as if they were more intelligent than us, despite evidence to the contrary. There are quite a few more years to go before they get that good!

Hi Clare,
Not familiar with the unity systems themselves but from a reasonable amount of PC experience "Blue screen of Death" usual eminates from a memory based problem. Not necessarily hardware, but odd interactions between operating system and application. Which operating system are you using? Have had some weird interactions between anti virus software in the past the last one meant my laptop took around two weeks to boot as the anti virus software i was using took offence to the network! Binned it and am now using AVG which is cheap and doesn't seem to have any major vices.

Best regards

Ed Bennett
Southwest Medical Ltd

I've emailed Lesley - thanks Graham.

The anti-virus software we use is Kaspersky. I can't remember who exactly chose it or why, I just know that it is particularly sniffy about other programmes on the system that have any kind of anti-virus recognition in them. If we could change to something like AVG, we would.

I think that - a bit like a vaccine - anti-virus software keeps a tame reference copy of the viruses it is to seek and destroy, and Kaspersky cannot seem to understand that these tame copies owned by other software are not the real thing, so it shuts the whole programme down!

A brief list of what is on the computers: Windows XP as the main operating system, Practice Navigator to store patient records (audiograms), PAS, Kaspersky as anti-virus software, the NOAH software (version unknown!) to co-ordinate the audiometers and Practice Navigator.

There is other software on the computers - Internet Explorer, etc, and I do wonder if a little more discipline as to what is kept on and what is removed might help. However, that is outside my frame of influence!