Evaluate the following Disaster Recovery case:
THE ADMITTING SYSTEM CRASHES
Jones Regional Medical Center (JRMC) is a large academic health center. With 900 beds, JRMC had 47,000 admissions in 2007. JRMC frequently has occupancy in excess of 100 percent; requiring diversion of ambulances. In addition, JRMC had 1,300,000 ambulatory and emergency room visits in 2007.
JRMC is internationally renowned for its research and teaching programs. The IT staff at JRMC is highly regarded. They support over 300 applications and 12,000 workstations. The admitting system at JRMC is provided by the vendor Technology Med (TechMed). The TechMed system supports master patient index; registration; inpatient charge and payment entry; medical records abstracting and coding; hospital billing and patient accounting; reporting; and admission, discharge and transfer capabilities.
The Tech1\1ed system was implemented in 1995 and uses now obsolete technology, including a rudimentary database management system. The organization is concerned about the fragility of the application and has begun plans to replace the TechMed system two years from now. On December 20, the link between the main data center (where the TechMed servers were housed) and the disaster recovery center was taken down to conduct performance testing.
On December 21, power was lost to the disaster recovery center but emergency power was instantly put in place. However, as a precaution, a backup of the TechMed database was performed. During the afternoon of December 21, the TechMed system became sluggish and then unresponsive. Database corruption was discovered. The backup performed earlier in the day was also corrupt. The link to the disaster recovery data center had not been restored following the performance testing.
Because there was no viable backup copy of the database, the JRMC IT and hospital staff began the arduous process of a full database recovery from journal entries of transactions. This process was completed the evening of December 22. The loss of the TechMed system for over thirty-six hours and the failure during that time of registration transactions to update patient care and ancillary department systems resulted in a wide variety of operational problems. The patient census had to be maintained manually.
Reports of results were delayed. Paper orders were needed for patient who were admitted on December 21 and 22. Charge collection lagged. Once the TechMed system was restored, additional hospital staff were brought in to enter, into multiple systems, the data that had been manually captured during the outage. By December 25, normal hospital operations were restored. No patient care incidents are believed to have resulted.
Write a four to seven page report discussing and presenting factual data and information regarding the admitting system crash at JRMC based on the following questions.
1. Identify at least three steps that the CIO could have taken to reduce the likelihood of the system failure.
2. What plans and changes could JRMC make to reduce the likelihood of a future system failure?
3. What factors did the Root Cause analysis reveal that contributed to the system failure problem?
4. What were the factors that likely contributing to the system failure?
5. What appeared to be most important factors contributing to the system failure?
6. As a board of trustee member what questions would you ask the CIO?
7. What issues and problems should a disaster recovery plan cover and prepare for?
8. How does an organization determine the amount to spend to reduce the occurrence and severity of such episodes?
The format of the report is to be as follows:
· Typed, double spaced, Times New Roman font (size 12), one inch margins on all sides, APA format.
· Type the question followed by your answer to the question.
· In addition to the 4-7 pages required, a title page is to be included. The title page is to contain the title of the assignment, your name, the instructor’s name, the course title, and the date.
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APA Format
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