Salinas Valley Memorial Hospital

Seeking a Robust System for Downtime Data Back-up and Protection

Salinas Valley Memorial Hospital is a Public District Hospital which is part of the Salinas Valley Memorial Healthcare System, an integrated network of health care programs, services and facilities. Located at the heart of the system, Salinas Valley Memorial Hospital is a 269-bed acute care hospital employing more than 2,200 people. Its medical staff includes 265 board-certified physicians across a range of specialties.

To back up electronic medication administration records (EMARs) in the MEDITECH Healthcare Information System in the event of a downtime, Salinas Valley Memorial Hospital relied on MEDITECH’s backup system, which proved to be limited for their needs.

“We were using MEDITECH the best we could, but found we could not get the data the way we wanted it,” reported Robert Johnson, IT clinical manager at Salinas Valley Memorial Hospital. “We needed a backup system for our medication records that gave us more flexibility.”

The hospital had heard about Interbit Data’s MPrint Server for directing data from MEDITECH to a PC and printer. When they contacted the company, they learned about NetSafe, Interbit Data’s new downtime protection and business continuance solution.

“We knew that MPrint Server was well-received and found that NetSafe was also well-received by the hospitals we spoke with,” said Johnson. “We heard that NetSafe was becoming the standard for ensuring data availability during downtimes.”

Finding a Downtime Solution That’s Easy to Install and Maintain

Installing NetSafe was “pretty straightforward” for Salinas Valley Memorial Hospital and its IT staff was pleased to find it did not have to make any changes in MEDITECH.

“Alex Konstantinovsky (Interbit Data’s director of implementation) came out here and helped install NetSafe so we would have no stumbling blocks,” said Johnson. “He’s been very helpful and supportive, and great at informing us on what the software is capable of.”

“NetSafe is a set-it-up type of solution that’s works really well,” added Sam Powell, system administrator for Salinas Valley Memorial Hospital. “The NetSafe installation was my first project when I was hired here, so I liked the fact we didn’t need to do a lot to get it going. NetSafe requires very little maintenance and sends alerts when it’s not running correctly.”

In the year since implementing NetSafe in March 2009, Salinas Valley Memorial Hospital has had three planned downtimes to conduct routine maintenance on MEDITECH. One of those downtimes was 12 hours, although downtimes are typically only 4-6 hours. Around 20 downtime work stations are located throughout the hospital for staff to access the information they need during a downtime.

“NetSafe allowed the hospital to continue working uninterrupted through the entire duration of these downtimes,” reported Johnson. “We did not experience any problems — we did not get any calls and the department directors said there were no incidents.”

Securing Up-to-Date eMARS and More

Most importantly, Salinas Valley Memorial Hospital is now able to print the latest medication records for its patients. With downtimes occurring prior to NetSafe, the hospital either printed blank prescription slips or eMARS to create new prescriptions manually or used eMARS that were printed ahead of the downtime.

“With NetSafe, we now get the most recent medication records and we get them the way we want them,” said Johnson. “We feel comfortable with NetSafe because we can monitor it daily.”

In addition to backing up and maintaining up-to-date eMARs, NetSafe has shown Salinas Valley Memorial Hospital that it does so much more.

“We figured out a way to feed information to NetSafe, so we had a program written so we can use it for outpatients,” reported Johnson.

“We have been told that anything that can go to a printer can go through NetSafe, not just MEDITECH information,” added Powell.

“NetSafe has proven to be a worthwhile investment, because it would have taken as much money to have one of our folks build the system, but it wouldn’t have been HIPAA compliant,” said Johnson.

“We like the fact we could just set it up, turn it on and walk away,” added Powell. “We can leave it alone and don’t need to do a lot to keep it going.”