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It was every hospital IT chief's nightmare: a hospital information system (HIS) crash. In fact, the Meditech HIS at Anderson Hospital in Maryville, Ill., crashed not just once but three times in a month two years ago. Re-starting it took up to 72 hours; in the interim, the staff had to resort to labor-intensive manual processes.
IS Director Michael Ward finally figured out the problem -- a broken hard drive in the storage area network, plus a missed software update. But management at the midmarket, not-for-profit hospital wanted assurances that staff would always have access to critical data, from a bed census and the staff schedule to pain management, laboratory and pharmacy information in the electronic medical record system.
A standalone disaster recovery (DR) solution would cost the hospital $100,000 that it didn't have. "Coming up with money for insurance for something that hopefully will never happen was very hard to swallow," Ward says.
Instead, Ward and his staff came up with a DR plan using existing tools and resources. They were already using a scripting tool from Boston Software Systems called Boston WorkStation to automate workflows within the HIS. Ward's team used WorkStation to develop a script that captures a snapshot of data from various parts of the HIS every two hours. The script puts the data into a PDF that is sent to one of 10 DR computers in different departments. Each PC has a dedicated printer that will still work in a network failure. Thus, in the event of a disaster, the hospital has access to the data it needs.
"Everyone likes to have data electronically, but do you really need that?" Ward says. "From a cost perspective, it's a great solution." Problem solved.
Michael Ybarra is a contributing writer for SearchCIO-Midmarket.com. Write to him at editor@ciodecisions.com.
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