Network reliability becomes ever more critical as systems proliferate

It's a simple truth about information technology: The more you have, the more you have to lose. Any CIO who's ever had to deal with network downtime can tell you that.

An escalating series of events, starting with the random act of a tree hitting a power line on an otherwise sunny morning, knocked the EMR offline at Fletcher Allen Health Care in Burlington, Vt., for more than four hours in August, just two months after the health system had turned on the EMR. Two sets of battery back-ups failed, sending an electrical spike through the lines that disabled storage hardware. Then the "failover" software that switches functions to one server when another goes down also malfunctioned.

"If you audited this and looked at what we did with failover and mirroring, you'd say, 'Wow, this thing is never going to go down.' And that's what we thought. When you line up the scenario that happened to us, you realize that you can't replicate this in a million years," CIO Chuck Podesta tells Healthcare Informatics. But it happened. And has happened to others. And will likely happen to more healthcare organizations as they bring up more IT applications.

While it's impossible to assure 100 percent reliability, many health systems are looking at multiple backups, dual data and power feeds and increasingly popular virtualization technologies. And they constantly test their capabilities. Thibodaux Regional Medical Center in Louisiana takes its servers down every 90 days for maintenance. Carilion Clinic in Roanoke, Va., has local backups and read-only mode so clinicians can continue working even during scheduled downtime.

To learn more about these strategies for network reliability:
- read this Healthcare Informatics story

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