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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.
In last week’s post, our Chief Security Information Officer, Michael Johnson, talked about ransomware as a symptom of a more significant ailment - a lack of well-defined controls, securities, or policies preventing malware infection. This week, we explore capabilities needed to protect facility infrastructure and maintain an acceptable level of business operations immediately following an attack.
In addition to proactive threat prevention from bad actors, it is equally important to plan for infrastructure outages, whether caused by malware infections, system failures, or natural disasters. Well-developed disaster recovery (DR) capabilities ensure timely system and data recovery.
In an environment where many hospitals operate on thin margins, investments in disaster recovery solutions are often considered low priority. However, the return on investment can far outweigh its cost in the event of largescale data loss. Every hospital should have a strategy for these key DR capabilities:
Cold sites provide power, networking, and storage failover capabilities but may not include all the necessary hardware to recover wholly and immediately.
Warm sites cover all elements to provide power, networking, and compute capabilities ready to failover.
Active-Active sites offer load balancing between locations and can failover one entire data center to another.
Without the proper recovery and backup systems in place, a hospital that experiences any data loss—from human or natural elements—will often suffer in several areas, including financial and operations losses, regulatory fines, drops in care quality, and reputation.
Avoiding many of the effects of data loss from a disaster is intrinsically tied to recovery capabilities. Hosting your facility’s EHR solution with a reliable partner can ensure the capabilities outlined here are covered, removing much of the DR burden from your facility.
At MEDHOST, our EHR cloud-based hosting service, MEDHOST Direct, covers facilities with high data availability and disaster recovery services. This solution alleviates many of the burdens associated with maintaining and managing your hospital’s DR infrastructure and business continuity strategy.
If you want to learn more about how MEDHOST can offer more peace of mind, reach us at inquiries@medhost.com or call 1.800.383.6278.
When disasters strike, the first response is to focus on the immediate needs of those people impacted by the event. Effectively meeting the direct needs of disaster victims often means taking a proactive approach to healthcare disaster preparedness and recovery well before disasters ever occur.
The transition to EHR (electronic healthcare records) has helped hospitals buttress their roles as gatekeepers of valuable health data, especially in a disaster scenario.
To effectively coordinate care and ensure patient safety during disasters—those with both natural and human origins—hospitals need to be able to freely access their EHR systems. Our disaster preparedness white paper addresses some of the top patient data and EHR questions healthcare organizations (HCOs) should consider when creating their disaster response (DR) plans.
There is a saying: “Technology is only as good as the user.”
What about technology problems that are beyond a user’s control? What if torrential rain threatens to flood a hospital server room, or a hurricane warning doubles hospital traffic in a matter of hours? What about when lives are on the line? Who does the hospital turn to?
Healthcare can’t wait, especially in times of disaster. When the unpredictable hits, hospitals need proactive EHR support they can depend on.
See how a MEDHOST hosted EHR solution and with dedicated support can help a hospital’s clinical and business operations stay afloat, even during the most critical moments.
Download the MEDHOST EHR Support infographic.
To learn more about our hosted EHR solution and additional disaster recovery services, email us at inquiries@medhost.com or call 1.800.383.6278 to speak with one of our specialists.
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Almost 15 years ago Hurricane Katrina scarred the face of New Orleans, leaving a path of devastation and destruction in its wake.
Over a decade later, communities like New Orleans’ Ninth Ward are still putting the pieces of their lives back in place. A paper from John’s Hopkins Center for Health Security (JHCHS) claims that a lack of adaptive disaster preparedness is partially to blame for New Orleans’ difficult recovery.
There is no single approach to disaster preparedness claims the JHCHS Framework for Healthcare Disaster Resilience. By identifying four “broad types of disaster,” the report states a community’s ability to recover and sustain healthcare depends on both inherent and adaptive factors. Hospitals play a critical role in a community’s ability to adaptively respond to different disasters. Ensuring EHR resilience is a core challenge of hospital disaster planning and ensuring adaptability.
A hospital disaster plan that incorporates a strong foundation of EHR support can enable providers to effectively prepare, respond, and recover in disaster situations.
Whether disasters come in the form of Category 5 hurricanes or a mass shooting, a hospital must do all it can to maintain an effective level of performance. Effective execution of a hospital’s disaster plan and its capability to perform care duties is heavily reliant on a responsive and resilient EHR.
If a tornado knocks out a community’s communication network, an EHR needs to be able to utilize multiple points of connection. If a bus rollover brings more than 20 patients into an emergency room, a hospital can’t afford to waste time working around EHR platform quirks. In all instances, EHR accessibility and performance requires both technology and human support resources.
An EHR technology architecture and support system must incorporate resources that are extremely focused, but also those that cover a broad range of needs. An EHR can withstand most disasters and add depth to a hospital’s disaster plan with the following:
1. Hosted EHR Technology
For many hospitals, one of the best ways to instill optimal EHR performance into a disaster plan is to choose a hosted solution. A hosted EHR solution will often include backups at short intervals to help minimize data loss and speed recovery.
Hospitals located in areas prone to natural disaster may also want to consider an EHR host that offers multiple points of connection or dual data centers. Multiple connection points often live directly on EHR hardware. In the event of complete hardware failure, hospitals who can failover to a remote, unaffected data center may experience less interruptions or shorter downtimes.
Many hospitals cite lower upfront capital expenses, improved hardware performance, and better security as top reasons for choosing a hosted EHR solution. Similar to an EHR with multiple layers of cybersecurity, a hospital’s disaster plan should include multiple layers of EHR support. The high returns of a hosted EHR can quickly diminish if support for that solution falls behind during a disaster.
2. Focused Team Support
A focus manager is a dedicated support manager who keeps in constant contact with a hospital. At the top tier of support, it is the job of a focus manager to listen to and serve a hospital. The relationship between a focus manager and their hospital is one of pure partnership.
The focus manager’s core responsibility is making sure all managed IT systems are meeting that hospital’s needs and expectations. As top-tier support personnel focus managers must be aware of every issue impacting a hospital, they are also responsible for keeping hospitals informed on all required system updates.
3. Customer Support
General EHR support personnel can act as an extension of the hospital’s internal IT team. In addition to answering and troubleshooting general EHR issues, support personnel can also help a hospital preempt critical service interruptions like potential disasters.
For example, MEDHOST customer support resources are constantly tracking dangerous weather events across the country. If a hospital is in a high-risk area, customer support can help them enact portions of their EHR disaster plan and coordinate priorities with focus management.
A community’s ability to respond to all the different types of disasters is dependent on many factors. Hospitals play a major role in helping communities adapt in disaster scenarios. Hospitals with an effective disaster plan backed by reliable EHR support can:
MEDHOST provides all of the mainstays of EHR support hospitals need. Call us at 1.800.383.6278 to find out more.
A hospital’s ability to accurately communicate and coordinate care is a key part of disaster preparedness for rural and urban healthcare facilities, states The U.S. Department of Health & Human Services.
In many natural disaster scenarios, rural communities and the hospitals that support those communities can often experience a disadvantage in communicating and coordinating care. A rural community’s remote location, coupled with other possible factors like dated travel and communication infrastructures, pose barriers most urban hospitals may not need to consider.
All circumstances considered rural providers should take a closer look at how EHR hosting can help secure operations, and more importantly, increase data integrity.
Rural hospitals can start effectively communicating patient data by working with an EHR hosting partner. Employing a third party to host an EHR system can provide an extra level of disaster protection for all healthcare providers, especially those located in rural settings. According to Jason Hebden, MEDHOST Senior Manager of Managed Integration Services, rural healthcare providers should expect an EHR host to offer the following benefits:
1. Dedicated system management that removes pressure from internal IT staff.
From a general operations perspective, and even in times of disaster, when behind-the-scenes EHR tasks are managed externally, internal IT personnel can focus on more pertinent issues.
2. Improved recovery speed.
Having hosted EHR servers can usually result in faster recovery. During a disaster, responsibilities for full EHR system recovery lie with the hosted service provider. Keep in mind that throughout and after a disaster, a hospital’s dedicated IT personnel are likely to have additional system outages taking up their time. A multitude of competing internal IT needs can delay EHR recovery.
3. Remote data backup, storage, and resilience.
If a server room is flooded or destroyed in a fire and the data is not backed up in a remote location—on physical media, in the cloud, or replicated to a dual physical data center—that data will be lost indefinitely. Losing access to patient data during a disaster is something hospitals should avoid at all costs. Once the local infrastructure is restored, rolling back to a source that was not impacted by a natural disaster event will save a hospital significant time and resources during recovery.
4. Redundancy in connectivity.
In some instances, a natural disaster can damage a rural community’s communication infrastructure. An EHR host may leverage multiple connection points to improve the probability of maintaining successful connectivity within a fragile network. If one point of connection fails, there will be another point to take its place.
5. Risk reduction.
Rural health providers’ disaster planning directed toward patient data security and accessibility is a matter of calculated risk. Healthcare data systems contained and managed on-premise require a good deal of resources during a disaster and are at even more risk, especially during times of uncertainty.
An EHR host can help a hospital save resources, lower risk, and also provide clear and documented answers to the following questions:
Rural areas that find themselves vulnerable to natural disasters and other potential mass casualty events must take a more communal approach to their disaster preparedness and response, states Paudel Bishow, the Chief Hospitalist at Holy Rosary Healthcare, a critical access hospital (CAH) in Montana. A community-centric reliance on fragile local infrastructures is one of the top reasons rural hospitals should consider offsite hosting and management for their EHR. When local networks fail, rural healthcare providers, need reliable backup architecture.
Bishow’s 25-bed CAH is located in Miles City, MT, 145 miles from the nearest major urban area—Billing, MT. In both emergency and disaster scenarios, Bishow notes that precise coordination between EMS providers is integral to ensuring patients get the specific level of care they need. He notes one of the best ways to achieve effective care coordination with EMS and other providers is through an integrated EHR that can ensure data integrity.
Geography and infrastructural inadequacies can place rural communities at a disadvantage during natural disasters, meaning they often need a bigger commitment from their community and providers.
Hospitals are the cornerstones for many rural communities. Leading up to, during, and after natural disasters, rural providers need to be confident in their EHR’s ability to help them effectively serve that community. Losing a locally managed EHR and the patient data stored within can create patient safety issues and additional risks. Recovering data from equipment that may have been severely damaged or procuring new equipment to restore data from offsite tape backups is a massive undertaking for hospital IT staff.
A hosted EHR solution can be an added layer of protection and sustainability for critical patient data systems. By taking the burden of EHR disaster response and recovery off the hospital’s hands, an EHR host can help rural healthcare providers more effectively care for people impacted by natural disasters.
Residents of rural or underserved areas can be more vulnerable to the effects of a disaster for a number of reasons.
Learn more about the impact disaster emergencies can have on smaller communities in a podcast with Toree McGowan, an Emergency Physician in rural Oregon.
In this podcast, McGowan points out that many rural communities are too remote from lifesaving services like trauma centers and lack certain resources, lowering their capacity to battle the effects of a disaster. During a disaster event, these conditions can put the lives of many rural Americans at risk. However, when disasters do strike, rural communities—and healthcare facilities—are not completely helpless. While disasters take on many forms and come with their own unique challenges, McGowan says that preparedness is a key factor to surviving these events and mitigating loss.
In this episode of Health IT on the Record, McGowan discusses disaster preparedness tips like emergency kits or “go bags.” She also shares from her professional experience running mass casualty response exercises and how they helped her rural emergency department manage a disaster situation with speed and efficiency. Listen below for the full story!
The sirens are sounding.
Much of the city has evacuated, except for maybe the few brave souls who stick out to gamble with the weather. What is protecting your health IT? What will be left behind after disaster strikes for communities as they rebuild? You’re a trained healthcare professional busy saving lives every day. You’re prepared, but what if mother nature throws a curveball in your routine?
After a disaster has passed, even before it is tracked, it can often be too late. Emergency preparation for both your patients and their health information is a year-round priority.
Since hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, and fires don’t pick and choose who they affect or to what severity, it is imperative that every facility should be prepared at all times to address situations where not only physical lives are at stake, but also when a downed EHR network could mean life or death. Not having a reliable and up-to-date plan to reinforce the healthcare data redundancy puts both your facility and patients at risk. The financial impact of a natural disaster could be in the millions.
In September 2018, Hurricane Florence unleashed a fury of water and wind on the Carolinas and Georgia, devastating local communities and testing the resiliency of healthcare systems and hospitals across the region.
In North Carolina, 40 of the state’s 130 hospitals were in the direct path of the Category 4 hurricane. In South Carolina, Gov. Henry McMaster declared a state of emergency ahead of Florence’s landfall, calling for a rare “Mandatory Medical Evacuation” that affected healthcare facilities, hospitals, and nursing homes along the South Carolina coast. In total, more than 1,700 people were evacuated as a result.
In addition, 2017 was a historic year for natural disasters, with the cumulative damage of weather and climate disasters causing around $306 billion in damage—making it the most expensive year on record for disasters in the United States. In Texas alone, 92 hospitals reported around $460 million in losses following the devastation of Hurricane Harvey. Although the vast majority of that loss comes from facility damage, $48 million came from office closures, billing and claims disruption, delayed or unpaid insurance claims, and more.
A report from NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) put Hurricane Florence damage estimates at around $24 billion, making it one of the U.S.’s top 10 costliest hurricanes. For reference, Hurricane Katrina in 2005 cost $192 billion and Hurricane Harvey cost $133 billion.
Effective disaster preparedness should anticipate and mitigate risk before disaster hits since emergencies flare up without warning. The healthcare industry is required under HIPAA to protect personal health information at all times, however proper preparedness and planning extends beyond managing compliance.
To avoid operational downtime and protect patients’ health information, many hospitals look to managed hosted service providers for simple, cloud-based services that offer tailored solutions to safeguard their data.
No matter the size of the facility, healthcare communities should prioritize disaster preparedness and recovery to the best of their ability. It’s not a question of if a disaster will occur, but when.
Ensuring operational continuity in the face of disaster is easier said than done. To learn more about prioritizing your hospital’s disaster planning and recovery strategy, download our brochure.
Driving through pitch black darkness unable to see water on the roads, “drowned” cars scattered among the devastation, Bianca Rivera quickly made her way to University of Puerto Rico Hospital where she held a residency in the hospital’s emergency medicine program.
One day after Hurricane Maria made landfall on the Caribbean island, Dr. Rivera was activated to relieve her fellow clinicians, some whom had been working 30-hour shifts since the storm’s arrival.
The Category 4 storm knocked out power to the entire country. Subsequent heavy rains and storm surges from Maria lead to sporadic mudslides and island-wide flooding. With an entire population of 3.4 million impacted by the storm, hospitals across the country would soon be facing not just the press of a surging ocean, but torrents of scared and panicked patients.
Rivera spoke with us at our podcast booth at ACEP about her experience in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. She discusses how critical it is to have a clear state of mind to effectively manage the flow of patients through an ER. As an aid to clinicians, an EHR designed to support emergency caregivers needs to be working at 100% capacity.
Having a reliable EHR is an imperative necessity for emergency departments, but as Dr. Rivera can attest, it is even more crucial in the event of a natural disaster.
Whether it be a Category 4 hurricane, wildfires, or a 6.0 earthquake, in times of natural disasters a hospital emergency room must plan for an influx of patients. They should be confident in their electronic healthcare and patient data systems to help them focus on saving lives.
Clinicians in the ER are often working on-the-fly amid the unpredictable. A natural disaster can throw even more chaos into an environment where emergency nurses and physicians are already pressed for time. When lives are on the line in unpredictable conditions, every member of the ER—from front desk to ambulatory personnel—relies heavily on the hospital EHR for the support they need.
Rivera elaborates on the value of a how a top-performing EHR can help clinicians remain focused in the midst of a natural disaster. Hear her full story in this episode of “Health IT on the Record.”
