The rumor mill appears to be churning again. Those of us in the MEDITECH community know it is small and information moves around it quickly. Sometimes the information is true, oftentimes it is not. We recently heard there were concerns that our product Desktop Fax does not work with versions of MEDITECH 6.x. Not to worry! We have numerous customers running […]
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As always, I thank our customers for choosing Interbit Data as a partner for their HCIS environment. We are committed to ensuring that we continue to provide the best products and services available in the marketplace. Every once in a while, we receive information that customers and prospective customers have been advised that our products are incompatible with the MEDITECH […]
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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.
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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.
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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.
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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.
Continue readingDowntime Patient Verification (DPV) works with our NetSafe business continuance product, which ensures that the latest patient information is available in the event of an HCIS downtime or a system failure. Using that information, DPV can generate and print bar-coded patient ID wristbands which can then be scanned against that patient’s paperwork for a correct match. Q: What is the primary benefit of […]
Continue readingYou may have the most advanced, state-of-the art technology installed, and a crack team of IT people to support it, yet downtime is inevitable. Yes, systems need to be brought down on purpose for maintenance or upgrades. But, there are the times when you-know-what happens (as Murphy’s Law ensures) and your system goes down. It could be a network or […]
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