By Kelly Baig
@KEHBaig

If MEDITECH is your hospital application, then you understand that it is at the center of how much if not most of how your hospital functions. Whether in terms of patient care or payroll, when MEDITECH applications are not available, extreme pressure is put on the people in the hospital. Disaster planning is critical to avoid downtime and extended outages, and to ensure patient record data is kept safe and available.

Drawn from our rich heritage of working with MEDITECH hospital environments, here are some surprising facts about MEDITECH application recovery which might prove useful in your disaster planning:

  1. The most common root causes to failures of MEDITECH applications are:
    a) Data corruption – which occurs at much higher rates than what most healthcare IT teams are aware, primarily because the corruption is not known until the application attempts to read the data.
    b) User error – this does not imply malicious use of the application, but common errors that are made in the day-to-day use of the system.
  2.  The vast majority of data recovery is performed from monthly backup tapes. This implies that monthly tapes should be kept local to where recoveries need to be performed, and then can be rotated off-site. Of course, disk-based protection methods may be preferable to tape: using disk, MEDITECH data can be retained locally to assist fast recovery while also protected by creating an immediate second copy at a remote location for disaster purposes.
  3. Often, IT is not the limiting factor to restore times. What this means, is that restoring the MEDITECH data and application environment is just part of an overall sequence of recovery events, all of which must be orchestrated to recover a hospital’s essential operations. This is sometimes underestimated by staff members whom have not experienced real disaster events. When planning Recovery Time Objectives, it’s important to know that IT recovery must be defined as a subset of the overall RTO for the hospital.
  4. Patient data is always important, but in some recovery scenarios it is not required as quickly as other data. Being able to categorize patient data, and to plan for staged recovery according to its criticality in the moment, will help provide health IT teams with the flexibility necessary to respond in real-time to shifting priorities during disaster.
  5. During disaster recovery, almost every hospital discovers that there is some application or set of applications which they have not been protecting. It is not unusual for IT teams to overlook applications, or underestimate their importance in the overall scheme of things, until they are faced with real recovery. Also, because of how busy organizations are, it’s common to skip key steps in the test of disaster recovery – only to be surprised when practice becomes reality, and find that data is missing or incoherent and unusable.

At the MUSE event coming up in late May, technology expert Chris Welch from BridgeHead will be hosting a workshop session in which he reviews these top root cause problems which undermine MEDITECH recovery. Chris will review three examples of how hospitals faced disaster, what each had to do to recover their MEDITECH environments, and some of the key lessons learned in the process. Come see us at MUSE in booth 700, and ask to speak with Chris or another of our team, for more details.