Contingency Planning Needs to Assume the Worst
In this month’s cover story, Health Data Management provides a detailed look into how several hospitals coped with hurricane Katrina in the summer 2005. Gulfport Memorial Hospital (Miss.) for instance had to adapt to events as they unfolded and cope not only with the storm itself but also with disrupted energy supplies bringing a cascade unexpected consequences. At one point the facility was running out of fuel for its backup generator and had to source fuel from the Army after it found the type of fuel available from the Mississippi National Guard wouldn’t be appropriate. Meanwhile, air conditioning units used to cool the server room had been torn of the roof, and servers had to be shut down repeatedly when the electric system repeatedly failed to keep up and running the mobile AC units brought to cool the server room.
Touro Infirmary in New Orleans similarly learned that it needed “backups for its backups” and offsite business continuity capabilities. Tom Walsh, an Overland Park, Kan.-based independent consultant is advising hospitals to conduct a business impact analysis and properly assess the importance of all applications. Nutrition systems for instance are less expandable than IT people tend to assume. Moreover, ancillary applications contribute to the reliability of backbone clinical ones. Disaster recovery systems can also prove useful even in the absence of catastrophes, for instance to prevent mundane but damaging connectivity loss between remote sites and a central application.
See also: Hospital Disaster Recovery Should Not Be Disastrous.
January 4, 2007 Related topics: IT & software