September 13, 2013 John DeGaspari
article
Samaritan Medical Center, Watertown, N.Y., a 294-bed community hospital, has seen its volume of data to grow significantly in the few years. That, in turn, has prompted the hospital to streamline the ways it manages and backs up its data from a business continuity perspective.
August 30, 2013 Linda Minghella
article
Having an effective response plan is critical for mitigating the impact of downtime, and your organization has likely put a tremendous amount of thought and care into its contingency plan. But your plan may have an Achilles’ heel that your organization is completely unaware of—a weakness that could leave your organization as poorly prepared as if you had no contingency plan at all. Where are the holes in your plan? Find them by asking a simple question: What is the longest hypothetical outage you have planned for?
July 12, 2013 John DeGaspari
news
Four Gulf states have partnered with six states in the East and Midwest to help patients and providers access critical health information when they are unable to visit their regular doctors or hospitals. The initiative is part of an effort to help make sure their residents’ health information is available after a hurricane or other widespread disaster.
April 23, 2013 Rajiv Leventhal
news
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.
October 30, 2012 Gabriel Perna
article
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.
August 28, 2012 John DeGaspari
blog
As Hurricane Isaac gets ready to bear down on the Gulf Coast, I’m reminded of Hurricane Katrina a scant seven years ago, and how important it is for hospitals to keep their disaster plans current. The good news is that advances in technology do help hospitals be prepared when it comes to protecting their electronic records. But implementing new technology puts demands on the hospital system as well, because it can affect how an organization reacts to a disaster.
August 17, 2012 Jennifer Prestigiacomo
blog
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.
April 11, 2012
news
The Cook County Health and Hospitals System (CCHHS), based out of Cook County, Ill., has announced deployment of a $3 million virtual data center for more than two dozen of its facilities in the Chicago area. CCHHS chose Minneapolis-based Datalink to create the data center.
November 3, 2011 John DeGaspari
blog
During my research for an article on disaster recovery recently, I was impressed by the lengths that hospitals go to make sure that they have a backup plan in place to prepare for any untoward event. If there was one thing that all CIOs interviewed agreed on, it’s that events are indeed unpredictable, and some of the examples involved a string of highly unlikely events that had a decidedly Rube Goldberg quality.
September 26, 2011
article
The rapid changes that are transforming the healthcare industry have posed many challenges to medical groups of all sizes. This month's cover story
September 26, 2011 John Degaspari
article
CIOs are hard at work coming up with the most effective and affordable strategies for protecting electronic data as their hospitals move forward on electronic medical records. While the rise of cloud computing and declining network costs are offering new opportunities in dealing with potential disasters, many find there is no substitute for good planning and constant testing.
September 7, 2011 John DeGaspari
article
Disasters can strike at any time, and are always unexpected. But planning for disasters is more than a matter of what goes on in the hospital’s data center. In the end, it is the hospital’s staff that must work as a team to set things right after a disaster strikes. And that means putting in place operational procedures, workarounds, and prioritizing various department functions that constitutes a business continuity plan.
