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When disaster strikes, the first thing many of us do is drop our day-to-day routine.
Finding a safe place to stay with our families, repairing homes or businesses, and caring for loved ones becomes our new full-time job. The community pulls together and takes stock of what’s important, stories emerge of courage and resilience—we find hope.
Healthcare professionals often face a different reality. Even though their homes, families, and friends may have been impacted in much the same way, they have an obligation to set aside personal concerns, treat the injured, and maintain healthcare infrastructure at a time when it’s needed most. Even if that means driving through the pitch-black darkness of a power outage or maneuvering around streets inundated with floodwaters.
The last thing hospital staff need to worry about at a time like this is the burden of electronic health record (EHR) disaster response and recovery. In this post, we’ll outline three ways a cloud-based EHR host can ensure that clinicians and staff have uninterrupted access to the tools they need at the bedside during any natural disaster.
EHR technology architecture must be elastic enough to provide highly targeted resources while also satisfying a wide range of demands. With the following features, an EHR can endure most calamities and add necessary functionality to a hospital's emergency operations:
Choosing a hosted solution is one of the best methods for many healthcare facilities to ensure continued EHR performance as part of a comprehensive disaster recovery plan. Hosted systems often include backups at regular intervals, which can assist in reducing data loss and accelerating recovery time.
Hospitals in disaster-prone locations may also wish to consider an electronic health record systems host with multiple points of connection or data centers. Healthcare organizations that can failover to a separate, undamaged data center may have fewer disruptions or shorter downtimes in the event of catastrophic, on-site hardware failure.
As part of a disaster medical assistance team, the technical manager keeps in constant contact with a hospital, ensuring all managed IT systems meet that hospital’s needs and expectations. As top-tier support, technical managers must be aware of every issue impacting a hospital. They are also responsible for keeping hospitals informed on all required system updates.
General EHR support personnel can act as an extension of the hospital’s internal IT team. Aside from addressing and fixing common EHR difficulties, support employees may also assist a hospital in anticipating important service outages.
For instance, MEDHOST customer support resources continually monitor harmful weather occurrences around the country. If a hospital is in a high-risk location, customer service can help them implement parts of their EHR disaster plan and coordinate priorities with technical management.
Through MEDHOST Direct, your data is safe. With minimal downtime and daily flash copies with secondary site data replication services for healthcare facilities, our HIPAA-compliant backups provide reliable security for your critical data in the event of any disaster mother nature can throw your way.
We have decades of experience championing patient safety in the eye of natural disasters. To learn more about how MEDHOST can be a dedicated part of your contingency planning, call us at 1.800.383.6278 or email inquiries@medhost.com.
