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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. -
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High availability technologies are technologies which will make the hospital information system online and ready to access from authorized users when needed. Because the hospital operates 24 hours every day and, in some cases, the information has to be reached immediately, the planning and application of High availability technologies into the health information system is very important and will benefit Patients and Hospitals as I will describe below.
Service quality: Applying high availability technologies will increase service quality in both effectiveness and timeliness.
Using RAID, redundant array of independent disks, will create data redundance which will increase the effectiveness of patient care and the hospital workflow. For example, Laboratory results of patient are accidentally lost from a hard drive failing. Instead of having to retest to get the result, which would make patients feel uneasy and consume hospital resources, data is still available and will be recovered to use on time by using RAID. Moreover, in the emergency situation, having immediate data recovery will benefit the safety of the patient.
Timeliness data access will be increased with the Load balancer. There might be some occasions of high demand in requesting data at the same time such as patients wanting to reach Hospital websites or physicians requesting data from servers. This could slow the time in being able to access data. However, using load balancer, clients will be distributed into multiple servers which will assist the client to connect to the server and make it quicker for data accessing.Financial issue: Applying high availability technologies will save financial resources for patients and hospitals. From the example above, using RAID in cases of losing the laboratory result means hospitals don’t have to re-test which will save the hospital budget and also the patient’s cost of travelling to re-test.
Apart from that, in case of disasters such as earthquakes or hospital fires which destroy one of the servers or nodes, using failover clustering by setting two geographical nodes will help to recover data and keep the system running. This would save costs for the hospital in setting up the new system and recovering and regenerating all data back to the system.Legal issue: Providing availability for electronic protected health information is one of the standards in the security rule from HIPPA. Therefore, hospitals should provide proper availability for their own system to reduce the problem of legal compliance and increase the reliability of the organization.
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The High Availability provides several benefits to the healthcare industry. The following are examples of healthcare services that need High Availability.
Patient service
Good High Availability improves the effectiveness of patient service. Physicians need several items of information to provide diagnosis and decide the best treatment. Information from each server is needed. If there is interruption of High Availability, it will affect patient services in many ways. The patient’s history review cannot be performed. Requests for laboratory investigation and prescription medication are interrupted. This can delay the care provided to the patient, especially critical patients who need immediate and prompt treatment. Furthermore, an in-hand application that the patient uses to contact the hospital is also interrupted. They cannot contact the hospital to postpone the appointment or to send some information to the hospital.Financial service
To run a financial service, there is a lot of information from different servers to summarize the hospitalization cost of a patient. If there is a High Availability, work on financial service work can be affected in many different ways. Financial summary cannot be made due to lack of some information. In addition, hospitalization cost is wrong if the High Availability could not maintain the same information provided to users. -
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Maintaining high availability in healthcare is essential to protecting the industry’s backbone operations from interruption by unforeseen circumstances. Communication systems should be properly designed and organized, since hospitals, clinics, and public health facilities depend on up-to-date and reliable data.
If I implement the High Availability technology in my hospital information system (HIS), the following benefits will be received patients and hospital,
-By storing patient records on both local and remote servers, hospitals may ensure that patient data is always available, even in the event of a system outage or other disturbance to their core IT infrastructure. The patient’s information remains in the hospital’s possession, and no duplicate records need to be kept.
-By providing a uninterruptible power source, hospitals may indirectly influence the quality of treatment provided to patients.
-It’s been shown that RAID arrays, namely those configured with striping and mirroring, may significantly enhance storage capacity, which is very helpful for hospitals storing large amounts of medical data.
– By using numerous hard drives, the system increases the speed at which the patient’s computer can read, write, and transmit medical records. Wait times at the patient register will be shortened as a result.
-To speed up the process of transferring inpatient monitoring data to the electronic medical record (EMR), hospitals will have better connection thanks to more balanced traffic distribution.
-If you’re a patient, you’ll be relieved to know that even during busy hours, your online doctor visits and other virtual consultations will go off without a hitch.
-There is more than one server available to function as a backup in case the primary server has an outage. This ensures the high availability of critical hospital applications. It keeps the hospital’s IT up and running 24/7 with as little downtime as possible.
– From the perspective of the patient, there is a constant and reliable line of communication between the patient and the healthcare system.
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From my point of view, if my hospital has implemented High Availability technology in the hospital information system, it would help all parties to operate more smoothly.
Firstly, Patients will receive services without delays caused by hospital computer system problems.
Healthcare workers are not frustrated by system problems resulting in taking care of patients with more peace of mind. The patient’s medical history is not lost even though it has been examined for a long time.On the other hand, The hospital will be favored by both patients (customers) and employees. The hospital was able to operate at full capacity due to a few system downtimes. Moreover, hospitals are ready to handle unexpected events such as power outages or ransomware attacks.
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In my opinion, implementing the high availability system at hospital as the HIS advantages are listed below.
Benefits to patients
– Ensure that all services are always available as the adequate medical care the patients responding to normal and urgent situation, for example car accident.Hospital benefits:
– Higher satisfaction in term of prompt response to patient inquires and/or patient related process for example patient referral process.
– The high availability of system may be considered as the opportunity hospital to upgrade to modern technology and support additional features for example telemedicine.
– High availability system with high failover tolerance could ensure that the information system is not vulnerable to malicious attackers. This could gain trust from stakeholders. -
Implementation of High Availability (HA) technology in Hospital Information System (HIS) would benefit patients and hospitals in several ways; in summary,
Start from increasing patient care service quality, digital health information has been used in every single steps nowadays for particular department and also interoperability.So data availability is one of the key important. HA technology will help and ensure that IT system can be able to run effectively with least disruption.
In terms of business running, HA technology implementation might cost a lot of budget, but when comparing with disadvantage and loss from system failure or disruption from any causes, it could be the most cost-effectiveness investment.
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If I were able to implement high availability (HA) technology in HIS, I think its benefit not only for patients but also healthcare workers themselves and stakeholders involved.
First, patients can get prompt services provided by hospital uninterruptedly. By having HA hospital can also operate all the systems without downtime regardless how many patients were at that time. In addition, hospitals can be able to serve for unexpected circumstances to make sure that information are ready and available for those who need it.
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If High Availability (HA) is implemented in HIS, It will ensure the availability of life-critical clinical systems and EHRs especially in case of emergency without impacting clinical workflows. Clinicians will have continuous access to patient data, allowing them to treat and diagnose patients without interruption.
Also, HA can reduce the impact to patients and hospital staff whenever IT needs to take systems or data offline to perform necessary maintenance tasks and provide protection from unplanned outages caused by human error or hardware failures and reduce the time HIS services are unavailable during your backups.
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Sorry for late response!
High availability technology is a very useful technology these days because it can effectively manage, distribute and ensure the availability of important data. For RAID technology can make a redundancy by utilising array of drives (depending on RAID type). If you need your data to be highly available and that data is too important and you cannot effort any risks of losing them, for example, patient history and medical records, billings — almost everything! Then, RAID (RAID-1 or higher) may be considered for use. In that case, it will certainly benefit both patients and hospital because there will be no interruptions delivering patient care. However, it might come with an additional cost for setting up a high availability system, but in the long run; it will ultimately provide a strong data protection in the future. Load balancing also ensure that the workload of data access is evenly distributed to all servers to reduce performance impact on a single node and thus, reducing delay in accessing data from users.
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Apologize for the delay in response.
In the patient aspect, implementing “High Availability” technology in the hospital will reduce the patients’ waiting time when they visit the hospital because of the fast and good quality of hospital services. The hospital systems will run smoothly with no interruptions.
In the hospital aspect, implementing “High Availability” technology in the hospital will minimize the system downtime and ensure data availability and is always ready to access. Using RAID technology, could provide system redundancy and protects the data against loss. Load balancing technology would assist the hospital system distribution of workload across the servers. Therefore, reduce downtime and provide healthcare service to the patient faster.
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