All of your posts in this thread are interesting and informative, as is usual for you. These predicaments are the type which lead to civilization collapse. Take away a teenager's cell phone and he will die. A wide-spread system collapse would cause serious damage. Such should not be the case.
Way back in 1970 I was a founding member of a company intent upon automating hospital information flow. Back in those days that was a new idea. We leased and IBM System 3 and got busy. The raw data was still collected on paper and that was submitted to keypunch, and then batch processed on the computer. The system worked well. We managed four hospitals by the time I got bored with that and headed out to work with Skylab.
I kept up with those blokes all along. They eventually put CRT terminals all over hospitals and setup interactive systems. These were connected over an RS422 star network using PDP-8s as concentrators. A paper-based backup was maintained and personnel were trained to use it. Many butts were saved from time to time. Of course, that system eventually gave way to Ethernet-based connectivity and PCs. That is when the feces hit the forced air blower.
Anyone who thinks hospital data flow is simple hasn't tried it. ;-D
I just don't see why a hospital MUST connect its network to the Internet. It would certainly possible to have Internet connectivity available without it being connected to a workflow system.
I see you picked up what I was putting down! I went to a conference once, and some doctor up on the stage was saying we need to make medical systems (and their communication protocols) so bulletproof and standardized that they were foolproof. He used bank transactions as an example, and I nearly fell out of my chair!
Bank transactions are pretty simple and dry, usually with one or two human inputs. One single medical transaction message might have input from dozens of humans, each one prone to making mistakes in the workflow!
Ah, well...it is a great goal anyway, right?