What happens if your McKesson System has an outage?

[Alexandra Casey]

Business Continuity is critical for organizations of all sizes and industries. Without business continuity, an organization will simply not be able to operate effectively, or at all, in the days following a natural or man-made disaster. While a disaster recovery solution is valuable, it does not compare to a strategy that can actually ensure that no downtime occurs.

This becomes even more important in industries such as healthcare. If a small retailer has to shut down, it may lose profits and customers. If a hospital has to shut down, it may lose lives.

That is why it is essential for healthcare providers to develop and implement thorough, effective business continuity strategies. To do so, these organizations must be careful to avoid some of the most common business continuity pitfalls.

Dodging mistakes

A number of these pitfalls were recently highlighted by Maurice Saluan for MSPmentor. The writer noted that many businesses fail to protect their data sufficiently, leading to interruptions and service failures in the event of a disaster. There are numerous reasons as to why this occurs, but among the most notable are a lack of sufficient prioritization and underappreciation of risks.

In the former case, firms simply don’t consider developing and implementing a business continuity strategy to be urgent, and so, as Saluan noted, they “just don’t get around to it.” In the latter, they don’t realize how damaging an outage can be. When data becomes unavailable, many businesses simply cannot remain operational.

This is even more true for hospitals. If a physician does not have access to information concerning a patient, he or she will be unable to determine the best course of treatment, and that can prove deadly.

Implementing the solution

As important as understanding the significance of business continuity is, this alone is not enough. Firms, and particularly hospitals, must also take the time to consider the best solutions for their unique situations. For many, the Summit Downtime Reporting System may be the answer. With the Summit DRS, hospitals are able to store patient information in emergency backup machines that are kept completely isolated from the network. If that network goes down because of a disaster, the critical information remains available, allowing the hospital to continue to provide essential services.

 

To learn more, click here to RSVP to

Business Continuity during a HCIS or Network Downtime

Alexandra Casey is the Marketing Coordinator for Summit Healthcare, a sponsor of McKesson Social.