In the second of this two part blog, Pedro Carvalho, Solutions Architect at BridgeHead Software, discusses why a Clinical Data Repository helped one of our healthcare customers continue an important project whilst experiencing unplanned downtime of its Cloud infrastructure.
Unexpected Cloud outage!
In the last instalment of this blog, I described a real-life example of a customer that suffered from an unplanned PACS outage; and, importantly, how it averted a crisis by being able to failover to its Clinical Data Repository so that it was able to continue providing radiology services. If you missed it, you can read it here.
Today, I wanted to talk about another downtime situation I was involved in earlier this year. On this occasion, the customer in question suffered an unexpected fault in its Cloud infrastructure, which effectively took its Clinical Data Repository ‘out of commission’… and right in the middle of an important application retirement project!
Clinical Data Repository selected to underpin data management strategy
A little background…
As part of its underlying digital transformation programme, and to underpin its data management strategy, the hospital in question decided to implement a Clinical Data Repository. BridgeHead Software’s Clinical Data Repository, HealthStore®; was selected by the hospital as the solution of choice. After the HealthStore was implemented, the first phase (of the multi-phase project) was to tackle the challenges of the organization’s legacy applications.
The hospital had identified a number of applications that were considered ‘legacy’, i.e. no longer in a production environment. For the most part, these legacy systems had been superseded by a newer, modern application suite that effectively made the older technology redundant. However, these legacy systems still contained a raft of valuable patient and clinical data that the hospital not only needed to retain for regulatory and compliance purposes but, more importantly, it wanted to ensure the data contained within these applications was easily accessible to clinicians and support staff as part of the longitudinal patient record.
For this phase of the project, the aim was to extract the data out of these legacy applications then make sure it was of a sufficient quality and associated with the correct patient identifiers before being ingested into the Clinical Data Repository.
Panic stations – the Cloud is down!
In this customer’s scenario, the HealthStore Clinical Data Repository was being hosted in a popular Cloud environment (which shall remain nameless). Work was well underway and going smoothly with the data migration of this legacy data into HealthStore when disaster struck. Unexpectedly, the Cloud zone where HealthStore was hosted (and in full flow of receiving large volumes of the migrated legacy application data) went down due to a technical fault.
As with all outages, you might expect a degree of panic in anticipation of the chaos that lay ahead. But that wasn’t the case in this instance. “Why?”, you might be thinking.
Well, what I didn’t tell you was that when we architected the HealthStore Clinical Data Repository, we developed it with resilience in mind. In all IT projects there is a degree of risk. That risk carries more gravity when we are talking about healthcare – if things don’t go to plan, it has the potential to impact care delivery and, ultimately, patients.
Then there’s the threat of cyberattack constantly looming, with malware and ransomware hitting the healthcare press headlines on a regular basis. We certainly didn’t want our customer to be a victim to cybercriminals, which as we’ve seen can be catastrophic; but we also sought to minimize the impact of other less severe (but nonetheless disruptive) planned and unplanned downtime events.
Two Clinical Data Repositories are better than one!
In the planning phase, we worked with the customer to ensure there wasn’t a single point of failure for the HealthStore Clinical Data Repository – especially given the large quantities of data that was being moved around behind the scenes. This was important from two perspectives. The first is that the customer didn’t want to incur any delays in the project that might add time, expense, and resource. Secondly, as soon as the legacy data was ingested into the Clinical Data Repository, it could be searched and accessed by clinicians for use in decision making and treatment plans – especially for patients with longer term, chronic morbidities where a rich history of information can make all the difference.
So, to eliminate these potential risks, we agreed to implement two instances of HealthStore in two different Cloud locations, with both receiving the same migrated data from the legacy systems.
When the first Cloud zone went down (taking the first instance of HealthStore with it), there was no panic and no chaos. That was simply because the data migration could continue seamlessly in the background but, in this case, just to the second HealthStore instance. The result: there was no crisis or stress; no loss of data; no restrictions on clinical access to the successfully migrated data… all in all, for those on the front line or working on the project, it was ‘business as usual’. And, in the background, the IT team was able to wait patiently for the Cloud provider to resolve the technical fault with the first Cloud zone until normal operations were resumed. Once the Cloud environment was back up and running, the two instances of HealthStore could then synchronize to ensure both had full copies of the migrated data.
Resilience must be at the core of your planning
Downtime – whether planned or unplanned, nuisances or more serious events – cause huge disruption for healthcare organizations. Sometimes, they simply can’t be helped. But you can, at the very least, mitigate their impacts. Planning is critical – seriously considering the potential risks and ramifications of downtime for your projects is essential. This piece can often be marginalized or overlooked, but it really is essential to build the resilience you need to avert or minimize the effect of downtime events.
At BridgeHead, we believe that ‘data is the lifeblood’ of healthcare organizations – it is the strategic asset that underpins consultancy, diagnoses, and treatment of patients. And that’s why, when we deploy our HealthStore® Clinical Data Repository for our customers, we spend a lot of time building resilience into the architecture such that we are able to offer them peace of mind that their data is appropriately safeguarded, protected, and accessible by clinical and support staff should they fall foul of a downtime event.
With 26 years in IT and over 15 years specializing in PACS, Pedro excels in analyzing, designing, and documenting client environments. As a subject matter expert, he contributes to pre-sales engagements and bid teams, playing a pivotal role in securing significant contracts. Pedro’s responsibilities also involve collaborating with business partners and vendors to plan and design implementation projects for BridgeHead’s Clinical Data Repository, HealthStore. He brings strong leadership skills to guide project direction and scope.
Outside of his professional life, Pedro leads a church choir and the local parish council. He actively participates in and organizes charitable events for the community.
To learn how BridgeHead’s Clinical Data Repository can help alleviate the pain of planned and unplanned system downtime in your healthcare organization…