Anderson Hospital, in Maryville, Illinois, is a not-for-profit, 135-bed, acute care medical facility with 220 physicians who treat more than 33,000 people a year.
Two years ago the IT staff at Anderson, was faced with a crisis every hospital IT staff fears: the hospital information system (HIS) crashed, not once, but three times in one month! During each crash the HIS was down for 48-72 hours, leaving hospital staff without access to critical patient information.
Although the IT staff found the problem was with the hospital's Storage Area Network (SAN), hospital administrators wanted assurance they would never be stuck without immediate and full access to patient-critical information ever again. The hospital needed to make changes to their disaster preparedness plan.
IS Director Michael Ward was tasked with finding and implementing these changes. "I began researching several disaster recovery software solutions, but soon realized a not-for-profit hospital like ours would not be able to afford the $100,000 price tags that came with these stand-alone solutions," said Ward. "We were going to have to put together our own low cost solution."
Ward and his staff began brainstorming, and soon turned to a scripting tool they had used successfully for three years from Boston Software Systems called Boston WorkStation™.
Boston WorkStation is a workflow automation and integration development technology that provides an environment for on-demand process innovation. Boston WorkStation allows healthcare organizations to dynamically respond to changing business requirements by automating common tasks, creating complex processes, automating interaction with websites, or integrating new applications, systems and devices.
Using Boston WorkStation, Anderson hospital was able to develop a script to capture a "snapshot" of critical information every two hours from various parts of the HIS including: bed census, pain management, labs, schedules, OR, pharmacy, medication administration and staff schedules. The script then organizes this information into a report, which goes to a specially designated computer in the appropriate hospital department.
Anderson has ten disaster recovery computer stations throughout the hospital. Each of these computers has its own printer and functions independently of the hospital network so they will not be affected in the event of a network failure. The reports from these stations are in Adobe Acrobat® files so hospital personnel are able to view and print critical information in the exact form they are used to seeing it.
While IT staff could have the system checked more often, they have found that a report every two hours allows them to track the majority of changes made to the HIS, ensuring for the most up-to-date information in the event of a disaster.
"In looking at all the solutions we could have purchased to provide redundant access to the data I'd say we saved more than $95,000 dollars by using Boston WorkStation to script our disaster recovery solution," says Ward. "At first this project seemed too big and too time consuming for our department, but the folks at Boston Software Systems really showed us how to maximize our resources to develop a disaster recovery solution we can really depend on."
Anderson Hospital regularly reviews its disaster preparedness to find what enhancements need to be made. "It seems at every meeting we come up with something new" says Ward. Anderson is now planning on electronically sending reports generated by Boston WorkStation to one of their remote sites, so staff will have access to critical information in the event of a natural disaster.
