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.
March 29, 2012 John DeGaspari
blog
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.
March 28, 2012 John DeGaspari
article
Healthcare data security spending is growing rapidly, and is expected to reach $40 billion in 2012—a 22-percent increase from 2011. The higher cost of maintaining data centers has led healthcare organizations to consider lower cost cities in which to locate these operations, according to a recently released report by The Boyd Company, Inc., Princeton, N.J. The study estimates that data security spending will top $70 billion by 2015.
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 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 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 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.
September 1, 2011 John DeGaspari
blog
Natural disasters have been on a lot of people’s minds lately, most recently, on the East Coast, anyway, as Hurricane hit land last week and caused devastation to cities and towns in its path. According to a report in the New York Times, total damage inflicted by the storm could reach $7 billion, based on an early estimate by Kinetic Analysis Corp., Silver Spring, Md.
August 25, 2011 John DeGaspari
blog
I recently had an opportunity to speak with Charles E. Christian, CIO of Good Samaritan Hospital in Vicennes, Ind., regarding the steps his hospital is taking to prepare itself for natural disasters. Christian believes that old-fashioned brick-and-mortar infrastructure cannot be overlooked when planning for natural disasters.
March 28, 2011 Joe Bormel, M.D.
blog
A professional colleague, Stacie DePeau, MBA, PMP, and parent extraordinaire, sent a link to me last week. The link took me to an article that detailed how one company and its local Tokyo retail store management dealt the earthquake in Japan. Although some will be distracted by the feel-good marketing halo the story inspires, the account contains a check list of crisis management issues in narrative form that are relevant for every C-level hospital executive
March 23, 2011 Mark Hagland
article
The five-hospital Saint Thomas Health Services, anchored by Middle Tennessee Medical Center in Murfreesboro, Tenn., several years ago became one of the very first multi-hospital systems in the U.S. to create a fully replicated set of data archives, rather than simply a mirrored configuration, to support the continuity of its PACS and other capabilities. That organization's leaders have derived great benefit from their innovation.
February 8, 2011
blog
As many of us know, Twitter and Facebook are beginning to eclipse Google as the most valuable Web properties on the Internet. Many CIOs continue to grapple with the implications of social networking on communication within the enterprise. We are experimenting in the very early stages of using Twitter-like technology on our campus within the walls of the enterprise.
