For hospitals and other healthcare providers, business continuity is an urgent need. Natural and man-made disasters, including floods, earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, system failures and network downtime can occur at any time. If a hospital does not have the proper business continuity tools and policies in place, service may be disrupted. This can have serious, potentially even fatal, repercussions for patients.
Hospitals should seriously consider making the development and implementation of a robust business continuity strategy a high priority. The only question for many is how to achieve this goal.
Writing for BizTech Magazine, Alan Joch recently pointed out that effective business continuity is a multi-stage process.
Setting goals
The first step for any hospital or other organization looking to develop a business continuity strategy is to define its goals, according to Joch. This will vary from organization to organization. For example, depending on their specialization, some hospitals may be able to continue providing care with a relatively small amount of patient data, whereas others will need virtually the entire database to meet their care goals.
Determining each facility’s specific needs will help hospitals to establish what business continuity tools they will need to procure and implement. At this point, it is necessary for the organization to consider its budgetary limitations. Obviously, this depends largely on the specific hospital, but ultimately institutions must accept that the risks presented by disasters are great enough to justify these expenses.
The right tools
As Joch noted, there are many kinds of business continuity tools and resources available to organizations. As valuable as these tools are, however, most are not suitable as business continuity options for hospitals.
This is why hospitals should consider investing in the Summit Downtime Reporting system. This solution ensures that key medical information remains available at all times. Even in the event of system downtime, Summit’s offering guarantees that physicians, nurses and other personnel are able to access patient records and other data necessary for providing treatment.
