High availability in healthcare is a critical mission to ensure the continuity of its information system, particularly when unplanned threats disrupt healthcare’s core business process. As hospitals, clinics, and public health centers rely on timely and accurate information, any information engines should be planned and orchestrated carefully.
Here are frequent advantages when the healthcare providers maintain their high availability through system redundancy, set up the Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) technology, load balancing, and failover clustering.
System redundancy
– For hospital: by using hard disk and cloud servers, hospitals can duplicate patient information in case of downtime or disruption in primary IT devices. Hospital still own patients’ data without making redundant records.
– For patient: by using a safe and uninterruptible power supply, there is an indirect leverage on quality of care (mitigate power loss when monitoring, diagnosing and treating all patients).
RAID technology
– For hospital: Using RAID can increase storage capacity and be useful for storing big data in healthcare, especially with striping and mirroring RAID array configuration.
– For patient: system’s velocity will boost computer’s speed because the process of reading, writing, and transferring health data are done with multiple hard disks. In healthcare, it will reduce queues at the patient registry.
Load balancing (using least connection technique and physical load balancer)
– For hospital: connectivity will be distributed correctly to prevent excessive traffic whereby it helps the medical practitioners to record inpatient monitoring data to EMR quickly.
– For patient: online appointments between patient-doctor and virtual consultations can be conducted without stressful loading problems on the website/application platform even if it is being conducted in peak hours.
Failover clustering
– For hospital: high availability of hospital applications is secure as there is more than one server as a slaver in case the active server is interrupted. It ensures all information processing in hospital all the time and minimizes downtime.
– For patient: there is a good communication channel for patients and healthcare that is streaming all the time.