Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity

As the third anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster just recently passed, a new mobile health program is launching to help address the still lingering health issues for residents of parishes affected by the spill.

When Hurricane Sandy struck the Northeast in late October 2012, it left a path of destruction. Homes and businesses along the coast fell prey to winds and flood waters and hundreds of thousands were without power. Even cell phone service in many areas was knocked out. In New York City, subways and tunnels were flooded and water from the East River rushed into the streets of Manhattan, threatening some of the city’s largest and most prestigious hospitals.

As some hospitals felt Hurricane Sandy’s wrath to the fullest extent, others on the eastern seaboard prepared for the storm by bolstering their infrastructure. At least two hospitals had contingency plans that involved backup data servers, generators, and on-the-clock patient care and infrastructure staff.

There were several things that caught my eye lately, namely Cerner's computer outage and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center's interesting consent management process that I find worth exploring. Putting together processes for data center outages and HIE consent management are just a couple of the many challenges healthcare IT leaders are facing today.

Cloud computing is becoming a valuable tool for hospitals, and there are good reasons for that, as more organizations digitize their clinical systems. I recently had a conversation with Richard Temple, executive consultant at Beacon Partners, Inc., Weymouth, Mass. Typically, a lot of the computerization by hospitals has centered on financial systems, and hospitals typically wanted to keep that information close, housing it in their own data centers, he says. But things were more manageable, in terms of what needed to be available. After all, if a billing system went down at night, lives didn’t hang in the balance. But with the advent of the computerization of clinical systems, hospitals are faced with requirements of uptime and redundancy. “Hospitals aren’t necessarily geared up to support a computing infrastructure of that magnitude, so they look to the cloud,” Temple says.