Disaster Recovery in Healthcare

Today, almost every critical human process depends on automation and electronic data. Hospitals and medical facilities have changed over to this trend with Electronic Health Records (EHR) forming a core aspect of modern day healthcare. With large data accumulating in the form of medical records and other hospital data, it is critical that healthcare centers should also have disaster recovery plan.

A data center outage in such a critical environment could potentially damage the lives of hundreds of patients. Hospitals must ensure that their service networks are reliable and always online. Why? Because these systems form the core onto which several medical equipments and patient data link to. There are several clinical applications that generate crucial data that must be protected at all costs. In fact, a disaster will affect every part of your business – from patient billing and lab work to personnel and purchasing.

To begin with, the hospital authorities should consult with the IT department and HR to discuss about the possible impact zones of a disaster. They should understand how each application is relevant to their business and how its outage could affect the operations of the center. The next step is to find out which sections are more vulnerable to outages. Suitable precautions and solutions to address these critical areas must be planned.

Finally, these critical services must have a remote access to the data back up and replication storage facilities so that in the event of a failure, these services do not go down.

Alex Carroll

Managing Member at Lifeline Data Centers

Alex, co-owner, is responsible for all real estate, construction and mission critical facilities: hardened buildings, power systems, cooling systems, fire suppression, and environmentals. Alex also manages relationships with the telecommunications providers and has an extensive background in IT infrastructure support, database administration and software design and development. Alex architected Lifeline’s proprietary GRCA system and is hands-on every day in the data center.