Is Your Facility’s IT Infrastructure Ready for a Natural Disaster or Emergency?

While there is no way to predict when natural disasters and other emergencies will affect your facility, having a disaster recovery plan will help enable your organization continue treating patients and using its EHR without severe interruption.

IT systems are progressively becoming more mission critical from a reliability and performance perspective, which is further taxing, overwhelming and pulling internal IT staff away from supporting clinicians' immediate needs. To complicate matters, natural disasters can wreak havoc on IT infrastructures, threaten the availability of critical data, greatly strain an organization's financial and human resources, and risk patient safety and data security.

It is important that hospitals not only evaluate available in-house resources and expertise to manage these increasingly complex data environments, but they must also have disaster recovery plans in place. More and more, hospitals are turning to outsourced resources that offer the know-how and bandwidth to help ensure the high-availability of systems.

Applications Services

In the report, "Diligently Evaluate Outcome-Based Managed Services Versus Capacity-Driven Staff Augmentation," Gartner Vice President and distinguished analyst Frances Karamouzis wrote, "More than 80 percent of organizations use staff augmentation as an ad hoc way of filling gaps in applications services strategies."

The report states, "Managed services are represented by the shift of delivery models from 'capacity on demand' to 'capability on demand.' Capability on demand is the tight bundling of software, services, and infrastructure to fit together and function seamlessly as a cohesive solution that is outcome-based."

While there is no way to predict when natural disasters and other emergencies will affect your facility, having a disaster recovery plan will help enable your organization to continue treating patients and using its EHR without severe interruption. Employing a disaster recovery and high-availability solution also helps reduce the risks that can occur due to system unavailability, as well as help prevent HIPAA non-compliance.

Contact us if you have any questions about MEDHOST's disaster recovery and high-availability solutions and determining what best aligns with your facility's needs.