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Advanced technologies, critical data support mandate health care disaster preparedness

by Kathy Hagood
Brevard Technical Journal

All businesses need to be ready to weather hurricanes as the season starts this month, but some organizations face more critical consequences if their systems fail during a hurricane or other disaster.

Hospitals, for example, must have access to critical patient data at all times to maintain patients' lives and health.

That's why major health care providers continue to invest in infrastructure and technologies with redundancies to allow information technology systems to operate no matter which way the wind blows or how hard.

Health First, for example, the primary healthcare services provider in Brevard County, has instituted a number of upgrades since last year's series of hurricanes.

Health First also has plans to build a more hurricane-proof structure to house the critical computer systems that support its medical operations and supply critical patient data in electronic form.

Health First's health information technology systems, t he core of which are housed in the Health First Business Center in Rockledge, support the operations of Cape Canaveral Hospital on Merritt Island, Holmes Regional Medical Center in Melbourne and Palm Bay Community Hospital in Palm Bay among other Health First facilities.

If the Viera Medical Center and Health Park is approved and built Health First's health information technology system will support it.

"Health care is 24 by 7 by 365. We have to operate every day as if a hurricane is coming," said Richard Rogers, vice president and chief information officer for Health First. Because more data is handled electronically than ever before, fail-safe information systems provided by a meshed network of communication technologies are essential.

"What we're responsible for has changed significantly in the last few years. The types of information management has changed. We used to be responsible for financial and administrative data, now we manage patient records and various diagnostic imaging," Rogers said.

Huge diagnostic imaging electronic files especially have placed new demands on the systems and made a reliable high bandwidth communication network with speeds of 620 Mbps to 2Gbps essential.

Health First uses advanced communication technologies such as dense wavelength division multiplexing over dark fiber and synchronous optical network connections, pointed out Steven Shim, Health First's director of technical services.

"Only a small percentage of health care providers use systems with this level of sophistication," Shim said. Health First's metropolitan area network was created by using various paths throughout the county and redundant core switch in main facilities in order to adequately address the potential for single points of failure. The intention is to avoid any down time for the end users, including physicians and other health care providers.

The information technology team has also has worked with utility providers to augment Health First's own electrical, telephone and Internet service infrastructure to allow for fewer outages during hurricanes and other disasters.

"We lost our Internet service for a time last year (during the hurricanes) and learned how dependant we are upon it," Rogers said. "We're taking steps to avoid that situation in the future."

Maintaining access to patient data is even more critical. The new business center to be built adjacent to the current business center will be able to withstand a Category IV or V hurricane and to better accommodate Health First's rapidly growing information technology systems.

The new business center is being built primarily to address the growing technology needs of Health First. Currently, the addition of computer servers has required auxiliary air conditioning at the business center.

"Disaster recovery in this case is riding on the coattails of expanding information technology requirements. We had no idea we'd be handling this much data this soon," Shim said.

The currently used business center in Rockledge can withstand a Category II hurricane in part because of the addition of hurricane screens able to withstand 150 mph projectiles. The business center is also outfitted with uninterruptible power supplies, dual generators and dedicated HVAC units.

Currently a mirror image of all of Health First's critical data is being created at Holmes Regional Medical Center to serve as a failsafe backup to the computer servers at the Health First Business Center. The mirroring will allow a information technology hurricane ride out team to stay in the local area vs. transferring critical data to tape and remotely monitoring from out of state, which happened during the series of hurricanes late last summer.

"We continue to work to make sure our physicians and other health care workers are able to access critical data any time they need it," Rogers said.

For more information on Health First, visit www.health-first.org