Mercy's Law — Hope For The Best, Plan For The Worst
By Dave Nesvisky, Executive Director NetApp Healthcare
EHRs are continuing to transform the healthcare industry for the better — providing critical data to assist physicians, changing how patients are treated, and ultimately improving patient outcomes. As EHRs become a standard of care, clinicians come to count on real-time information, accessible when and where they need and want it.
However, as Murphy’s Law states, anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. For healthcare organizations relying on EHR systems, it’s not only important that the system perform reliably under optimal conditions — it’s critical the same system works when everything goes wrong.
Beginning in 2004, Mercy started its EHR project and, in 2009, made a $60 million investment in a new data center. This included moving all of its clinical operations to a single, patient-centric Epic Systems EHR with an initial investment of hundreds of millions of dollars. Mercy Technology Services (MTS) managed the implementation, driven by a goal to provide centralized IT operations for Mercy’s 32 hospitals and 300 outpatient locations, across several states.
A key component of the transformation was Mercy’s shift to a virtualized storage environment, leveraging NetApp technology. With more than 1,100 applications in use, this decision was met with skepticism and controversy. In 2006, virtualized environments were still in their infancy. Still, Mercy's IT leaders remained confident this would be the best way to arrive at the infrastructure position they wanted.
By 2010, Mercy’s new 42,500 square-foot state-of-the-art data center was up and running, supporting Mercy’s hospitals, physician offices, and ancillary services. To ensure reliable accessibility of clinical data — no matter what — the center was designed with fail-safe features to withstand a variety of natural events, including an EF2 tornado, power or water interruptions, and even failures within the building itself. Every support system that protects data in the center is fully duplicated — with backups for power, cooling, and network connectivity — and the facility can operate up to 72 hours in the case of an electrical power outage.
In May 2011 — just a few weeks after the new EHR system was moved to the new data center, the virtualized environments and fail safes were put to the test when a tornado destroyed the Mercy hospital in Joplin, MO. Despite widespread damage at the hospital, access to the EHR enabled seamless and continuous care as patients were transferred to other healthcare facilities, both in the Mercy system and outside it, after the storm. Patient data was immediately accessible and staff was able to utilize an emergency conference bridge to communicate with non-Mercy hospitals to deliver patient data. As a result, the 183 patients affected were never without their medical records.
The Joplin tornado underscores the importance disaster preparedness for healthcare facilities, including continuity planning for EHR access. Providers rely on universal access to data to improve the quality and effectiveness of patient care, even — as events of May 22, 2011 would prove — in the midst of a natural disaster. At the end of the day, it’s great to hope for the best, but it is absolutely critical to plan for the worst.
About The Author
Dave Nesvisky is the Executive Director of Healthcare for NetApp, Americas. Nesvisky is responsible for creating a comprehensive healthcare vertical practice for providers, payers, and select healthcare software companies. He is responsible for product direction, alliances with PACS, EMR/EHR vendors, emerging technologies and thought leadership. Nesvisky has over 25 years of technology sales and sales management experience, the past 18 years of which in healthcare technology, including Vice President — Healthcare at Oracle, Senior Director of Healthcare at Red Hat, Vice President of Post-Acute System Sales at Misys Healthcare Systems and Vice President of Sales at Quovadx, supplier of Cloverleaf.