When people think about healthcare information system downtimes, they often immediately think about the impact on patient care. But, downtimes can be very costly in terms of both patient safety and dollars, especially if you don’t have a good business continuance plan, which we’ll outline below. But the financial costs are not the only costs.

Hospitals are a bit like cities. Cities have systems that keep them running, such as sanitation, police, and power. Hospitals have an HCIS. What happens when this system stops running? For a hospital, suddenly, the technology that helped it run like a well-oiled machine is gone. Uh oh. It will impact the entire hospital, but arguably the following four roles […]

One moment all was “normal.” Or the “normal” that nurses and other clinicians, admissions and pharmacy staff experience each day. But then the hospital gets an unexpected surprise. The patient rounds, the dispensing of meds, the patient intake, the normal things that happen every day, shift after shift, suddenly get the equivalent of a splash of cold water to the […]

HIPAA’s “Security Guidelines” mandate that all healthcare organizations using healthcare data comply with its data security and business continuity standards, and the penalties and fines for noncompliance are substantial. A contingency plan for disaster recovery and business continuity is a key standard stipulated in the HIPAA Security Rules under the Administrative Safeguards Section, so you clearly need to have such a plan in place.

As mentioned in our previous blog, “The Inevitable HCIS Downtime,” your healthcare information system (HCIS), which houses all your patient information, can be brought down for reasons that are planned (maintenance, upgrades, etc.), but unplanned downtimes can occur at any time due to a number of reasons, including a loss of power, network connectivity, natural disaster, or even a system failure. Network, system and power outages occur annually, and always at a cost and impact to your organization.

What goes up must come down. As healthcare processes have become more and more automated and healthcare organizations transferred to electronic health records to simplify patient data management, a new set of challenges has emerged. Security of electronic patient data is one, mainly due to HIPAA and other governmental regulations. Healthcare information system (HCIS) reliability is another challenge.