Disaster Planning
Seamless Solution For Disaster Planning
Disasters are typically viewed as low probability yet high impact events. Disasters come in all different formats. They can be natural or man-made. They can come in the form of hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, fires or chemical releases. They can come with days of prior warning or can happen without any warning at all.
Many hospital have developed extensive disaster prepareness plans to face disasters. The South East Regional Hospital Authority (SERHA), based in Moncton , N.B., has been using ROAM not only to connect healthcare professionals to the hospital’s IT system from a distance, but also as a key part of their disaster planning.
“We know there’s a pandemic flu coming, and when it hits, only key personnel will be allowed on site,” said Jacques Lirette, CIO of SERHA. “But using the remote access solution, we can have all personnel remotely connected.”
The same kind of access would be available in the event of other disasters – such as fires, floods or blizzards. Using ROAM, Staff members would still have the ability to view files, including diagnostic images and medical charts.
SERHA has 2,700 employees, including 260 physicians and dentists. It has an operating budget of $180 million, with about $4.6 million spent annually on information technology.
SERHA faced an emergency situation of its own during a labor dispute in September 2004, when many staff members didn’t want to cross the picket lines. But using the ROAM remote access system, many were able to obtain secure access to patient files, as well as administrative and financial records, at a distance.
Physicians were assigned access to certain types of files, such as electronic medical records, which administrators might be given permission to view organizational or business information.
During the 2004 labor dispute, some 400 managers and at SERHA were provided with ROAM accounts – a process that took just a few hours. Interestingly, 70 percent of them have continued using ROAM since then and 60 percent login each day.
A key factor in the choice of ROAM is its ease of use, Lirette said. Not only is it easy to set up, it is also web-based and essentially operates like a browser, which most people have used.
ROAM is an effective solution for disaster planning, as users can be quickly added in the event of an emergency, and user accounts can be quickly activated or de-activated.