Comment by pm24601
7 years ago
You are making a bad assumption here: "Any system" ... Chances are we are talking about multiple systems created at different times and by different companies.
I could easily see a case where the timestamp is stored as a string to interoperate across various computer SYSTEMS.
Doing a wide scale fix for this problem is probably cost-prohibitive - assuming it is even possible.
From experience with an EHR system: these things are so big that interoperating between different pieces of big-ball-of-mud systems is a dicey matter and making any changes requires extensive manual tests, since there are approximately zero automated tests.