It's up to individual organizations to determine how robust their Healthcare Operational Continuance solution needs to and will be. An easy way to measure the aggressiveness of the plan? Take a look at the Recovery Point Objective (RPO). Is it 24 hours (i.e., it's okay if the point in time to which the hospital's IT environment will recover is up to 24 hours in the past)? Or, is it two hours? Clearly, one means a lot less lost data than the other--a critical measure, particularly for those organizations who have implemented Advanced Clinical Systems (ACS).

But, hard as we may look, it's difficult to find a healthcare organization that has successfully implemented a true "zero-downtime" solution.

That means that every organization needs to carefully document the Departmental Downtime Procedures that employees should follow during a downtime, whether that downtime may be brief or extended.

Most hospitals have created these documents at one time or another. But whether these are actually up-to-date and whether current employees have been trained on their use is frequently a different matter altogether.

The MEDITECH Solutions Group within Dell Services has created a service to assist MEDITECH organizations in ensuring their departmental staffs know where to go and what to do--particularly as it relates to continuing to treat patients--during a downtime. During this engagement, our consultants direct and coordinates development and/or remediation of a hospital's standardized departmental downtime procedures. The goal of any such project--whether undertaken in collaboration with us or independently--is to achieve consistency, inter-departmental integration, and usability of these procedures so that a downtime--whether 30 minutes or 30 hours--has the least negative consequences possible.

Once downtime procedures have been established, Dell Services consultants use Summit Healthcare Downtime Reporting System (DRS) software to deploy on-demand reporting based on users needs to facilitate operational continuance, execute downtime procedures, achieve compliance, and ensure patient safety.

Summit DRS product provides clinical and non-clinical users with point-in-time reports containing vital information during a MEDITECH downtime event. This software provides a bridge to MEDITECH system data during downtime, providing users with pre-defined reports containing the information they need to continue day-to-day operations. Dell Services consultants customize DRS to meet the needs of the hospitals downtime plan and covers a wide spectrum of departments and users. By reviewing applications and workflow needs, our consultants design a strategy for implementation, define reporting requirements, and determine scheduling needs.