By Don Kinser, PE, CPHIMS – President and CEO
For Part One of this Post Click Here
The purchase, implementation, and training costs for an EMR (really the entire HIS application portfolio) are staggering and the timelines are daunting. This leaves little capital and even less staff resources to focus on the foundational infrastructure that EMR’s must run on. Nothing in the Stage 1 and Stage 2 criteria has anything to say about how reliable or available the data must be, only that you are collecting and reporting it.
What we have learned repeatedly in healthcare is that there is no going back to “how we used to do it” when the network goes down or the data center crashes. Physicians, nurses, and other clinical professionals quickly come to rely on the new electronic systems and just as quickly forget how they did things in the old paper world. In the brave new world of meaningful use and reliance on electronic orders, digital imaging, electronic delivery of lab values, the availability of the network and data are critical and patient’s lives hang in the balance. I am concerned that people will die.
Many, if not most, existing healthcare data centers are at a breaking point. They lack available power or cooling to accommodate the phalanx of new servers that EMR’s and other HIS applications demand. They are too small. They lack sufficient fault tolerance. Instead of making needed investments in their data centers, many are just making do with what they have. They are band-aiding things just to get by and setting themselves up for potential disaster as they transform their clinical care to rely on this digital information. There is simply not enough capital or staff resources to fix the foundation as these organizations deal with “Meaningful Use”, ICD-10, and try to figure out what the new world of Obamacare means to their business. Furthermore, despite the deficiencies in their primary data center, most lack a defined backup or disaster recovery strategy.
Click Here to watch EDI’s Healthcare Data Center Video – “What Keeps You Up at Night?” and Follow me @DonKinser on Twitter!
