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.
September 28, 2012 John DeGaspari
article
As health information technology and health information exchanges (HIEs) make progress on improving the quality of healthcare, one area that has received limited research is how HIEs can provide timely access to clinical information in response to a disaster. That's the subject of the final report, released in July, of the Southeast Regional HIT-HIE Collaboration (SERCH), which makes recommendations to improve how the nation's ability to respond to natural disasters through the use of HIEs.
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.
August 9, 2012 Joe Bormel
blog
The HCIT challenges elaborated in the context of AF447 remain challenges for us all. They underscore the necessity to move forward: off of paper, off of systems relying on individual human brain power, off of unreliable communications of semantically inoperable health stories, and off of systems without clear databases, shared and common measurement frameworks, and disciplined processes based on solid problem lists.
August 1, 2012 Joe Bormel
blog
In Part 1 of this series, we reviewed the crash of Air France Flight 447. I noted that from the final report of the tragedy, I developed eight factors that contributed to the loss of everyone aboard that I believe can be directly related to Clinical Decision Support in healthcare IT. Now, let's explore the first four points in-depth to learn how they really do apply to HCIT CDS.
July 20, 2012 Joe Bormel
blog
Earlier this month, the final crash report on AF447 was released. The implications for HCIT safety, usability and hazard governance are profound. The crash occurred on June 1, 2009. All 228 people onboard were killed, and it took three years to unravel the mysterious components of the story. ... read more...
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
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
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