Medicine works better with networked computers. But what happens when the network fails at a large metropolitan Medical Center?
The crisis began on a Wednesday afternoon, Nov. 13, and lasted nearly four days. Before it was over, the hospital would revert to the paper systems that governed patient care in the 1970s, in some cases reverting to forms printed ''Beth Israel Hospital,'' from before its 1996 merger. Hundreds of employees, from lab technicians to chief executive officer Paul Levy, would work overtime running a quarter-million sheets of paper from one end of the campus to the other.
