Technology has gone a long way in assisting healthcare professionals in providing quality care for their patients. But when the technology goes on the blink, the ability to provide care is severely hampered.
A recent computer system outage at a community hospital in Boulder, CO proved the point when data loss became a serious issue. Something as simple as making appointments for blood work or something as critical as scheduling surgeries or getting results from lab tests became very difficult because of the outage.
The computer outage and data loss was far-reaching, hitting the main hospital, the campus at the hospital’s Foothills location, six imaging centers and eight laboratories. Hospital spokesmen said they had many people working to solve the problem as quickly as possible. While technical workers tried to solve the issue, healthcare workers went back to using a paper record-keeping system. While the system allowed them to continue treating patients it was less than adequate to provide the level of care they had with their computer system up and running.
Hospital administrators and IT personnel were taking the brunt of the criticism for not having a backup system in place. One critic said that hospitals today should all have disaster recovery and backup systems in place and that the Boulder hospital’s approach was archaic. Another critic was amazed that it would take nearly a week to schedule minor surgery, and if they can’t be trusted to keep their technology systems up to date, how could they be trusted to wield a scalpel on a human being?
While the situation in Boulder touched a large population, rural facilities can be similarly affected when their computer systems go down without a backup in place. Disaster recovery is extremely important even in the healthcare facilities far from the urban cores. Facilities that undertake these precautions are undertaking a subset of business continuity with a focus on IT or technology systems that support the business functions of the facility.
HIPAA regulations include a section regarding protecting patient information in situation where a disaster, man made or natural, occurs. Many facilities use these regulations as a guideline for developing their own disaster recovery efforts. Radiologists providing diagnostic results must ensure that their images are accessible 24/7, regardless of the disaster at hand, which means building a recovery plan is essential.
HIPAA actually requires that two copies of ePHI exist so that when one system fails, there is another copy existing on another secure server that can be accessed. Some rural healthcare centers have found that the cost of establishing a disaster recovery system seems excessive – but the costs of losing data and being unable to care for patients during data loss are far higher, and with an experienced team, establishing a system can be quicker and more cost-effective than ever before.
OffSite Image Management, Inc., focuses on the rural areas that need a backup system that gives them exactly what they need without going over budget. OffSite’s plan will protect the data of the organization, ensure immediate access to stored records, offer multiple and alternative access channels by authorized users and allow healthcare professionals that ability to maintain normal operations.