In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, disaster preparedness and recovery has become a high-profile focus within the medical community. When Katrina struck, thousands of medical records were permanently lost and care was compromised. Patients could not find their physicians, and they did not know the names of their vital prescriptions. Additionally, emergency workers had no records of their patients' allergy information or medical histories.

Disasters, such as floods, earthquakes, fires and tornados, are not unique to Louisiana or Mississippi and can strike any hospital at any moment. One often assumes that the worst-case scenario is virtually impossible, but in order to be truly prepared, you must plan for everything. Unless you plan for disaster and frequently rehearse it, you will not be ready when it strikes. Have you thought about how your institution would fare in a disaster? If your building collapsed tomorrow, would your data be safe?

Considering Disaster Recovery

When considering disaster recovery, you first need to think beyond system failure and recovery. You need to consider the entire hospital, overall community and how you can assist in times of dire need. In addition to triaging and providing critical treatment, disaster plans should consider how to make the whole medical record available at a time when it is most necessary. Without this critical information, patients cannot be properly treated. And this makes any disaster situation much worse.

The first step is moving from paper-based records – which makes information particularly vulnerable in the case of hospital-specific disasters – to digital records. Unless we universally move to an electronic medical record and back up that information with a recovery plan in mind, we will be vulnerable to all disasters.

When looking into disaster recovery, make sure your vendor has a full plan. Vendors often claim they provide disaster recovery services when, truly, they only have disaster recovery features, such as redundancy and system recovery. Hospitals are often left to create disaster recovery plans on their own, and these plans don't always take into account the complexity of the data.

If you have a third-party vendor that specializes in disaster recovery, make sure they understand your product and data configuration so they can get your system back up and running within a reasonable timeframe.

The most important requirement is enabling patient-critical care to continue. Ask your vendor the critical questions: "Do you have a disaster recovery plan in place? And, if so, what is it? Is it documented or tested?" "How quickly can data be recovered?"

Additionally, what does your vendor guarantee? How will they help you during a time of disaster? And how will they help you keep the system up and running on a continual basis? In a disaster situation, access to medical records is vital in providing critical treatment. If there are no contingency plans in place to keep your hospital functioning, care is compromised.

A Back-up Plan

In addition to server redundancy, Philips, for instance, aids a facility's disaster planning efforts through geographical fault tolerance and contractually guaranteed data recovery.

Geographical fault tolerance places redundant servers in separate physical locations, such as another building of the hospital. Therefore, in the case of a localized disaster, such as a flood in the server room, there is another server working, thus ensuring that care can continue.

Moreover, as images arrive to iSite PACS, a copy is routed to one of Philips' off-site data centers in Dallas or San Jose, Calif., so that in case of a total disaster like Katrina, data is not permanently lost. We also back up the database that makes the image data useful.

Third-party vendors often back up image data, but not the configuration for information integrity. Make sure that if your data is lost, your vendor can replace the image data in a timely manner and rebuild the information as it was prior to the disaster. And when evaluating disaster recovery planning, make sure that your vendor has your needs in mind. If you prepare for the worst-case scenario, you will be able to do your best when the unthinkable occurs.

— Matt Long is the vice president of the North American sales and service region at Philips Healthcare Informatics, a part of Philips Medical Systems (www.medical.philips.com) in Andover, Mass. Questions and comments can be directed to editorial@rt-image.com.