North Country Regional Hospital

Accessing Patients’ Medication Records During System Downtime

North Country Regional Hospital in Bemidji, Minnesota is part of North Country Health Services, which includes the 118 bed medical and surgical facility and a 78 bed skilled nursing facility.

As a user of the MEDITECH Healthcare Information System (HCIS), North Country Regional Hospital needed to ensure its clinicians could access the electronic medication administration (eMAR) records on their patients in the event of downtime. The hospital found the precise solution in NetSafe, Interbit Data’s downtime protection and business continuance software.

“We had heard about NetSafe as a result of using other Interbit Data products,” stated Robin Gullickson, Director of Information Technology Applications Development and Support. “We use NetAccess and NetFax extensively and also own MPrint, so we were familiar with the company and happy with the support they provided. The staff at Interbit Data was great at helping us get set up and they respond quickly to questions and any issues we have.”

North Country Regional Hospital found that NetSafe not only met the need to ensure uninterrupted availability of patient records in MEDITECH, but could also be used to safeguard and enable access to other important information used by clinicians and hospital staff.

“NetSafe proved to be more than a downtime solution for eMAR information,” affirmed Gullickson.

Maximizing and Extending NetSafe’s Capabilities

Since implementing NetSafe in late 2007, North Country Regional Hospital has expanded its use of the software extensively.

While North Country Regional Hospital’s IT Applications Department maintains NetSafe and is the primary user, numerous other departments at both the hospital and its long-term care facility use it as well. While nursing units utilize NetSafe solely for accessing information during downtime, non-nursing departments utilize it for additional purposes.

NetSafe makes an abundance of information available to clinicians and hospital staff during downtime. The hospital sends over 40,000 files to NetSafe each day that, in addition to eMAR information, include census reports, patient profiles, dietary information, nursing documentation, lab summaries, doctors’ rounds reports, surgery preference cards, Emergency Department Module (EDM) data, unit number listings to pull paper charts, a downtime paper charting form, labels for each current inpatient, and documentation templates.

North Country Regional Hospital is also using NetSafe to help with daily processes that can be cumbersome. The hospital sends EDM data to NetSafe so the HIM staff is able to just go to NetSafe and print the data when needed. The hospital’s Quality Care Services staff prints the nursing cumulative patient profiles to NetSafe when they are doing a case review or abstracting the record. The hospital does something similar for the external reviewers who come in to review death records.

“We like NetSafe and the ability it provides to make any type of information easily available, especially in the event of downtime,” reported Gullickson. “The more we use it, the more uses we have found for it, and the more it has become an integral part of our downtime procedure.”

Rising to the Occasion when Downtimes Occur

North Country Regional Hospital has had brief unplanned network outages in which NetSafe was used to provide physicians with access to lab results; however the majority of downtimes have been planned.

During a recent planned downtime, the IT Technical Services Department had scheduled 4-8 hours for Data Center maintenance, however the actual amount of downtime turned out to be 14 hours. Although the network was not available, clinicians and others were able to go into NetSafe and retrieve any information they needed — lab reports, patient profiles, etc. — as well as eMAR information. Also, all the information was available to view and/or print.

“NetSafe worked well, did what we asked it to do and was a big help during this downtime” reported Gullickson. “We hope that our network and MEDITECH will continue to have a high uptime percentage, but in the event that the system or network fails, I’m glad we have NetSafe to assist us during that downtime.”