How Smart Hospitals Handle Mission-Critical IT The Dont Compete For Campus Resources

Over the last several decades, the adoption of automated healthcare systems has dramatically accelerated in healthcare organizations, especially in the hospital campus environment. In fact, we are already transitioning from the “digital hospital” phase to the “smart hospital” phase, when it comes to the deployment of automated systems in hospitals that use state-of-the-art IT. This automation has led to specific service-level requirements for uptime and availability whether they operate with on-premise IT or with offsite IT service providers.

So, the emerging requirements of innovative patient care services and tools — such as electronic health records (EHR), automated care management, point-of-care technology linked to EHR, automated case documentation, and physician order entry linked to EHR — demand mission-critical primary and emergency power resources on a hospital campus. These power resources serve many missions, including basic life safety in the buildings (such as emergency lighting and fire protection) as well as supporting aforementioned patient care systems that could be IT related as well as mechanical.

Thus, hospitals have a greater risk profile in the event of an outage and need to consider a wide variety of additional risk factors that they need to manage in the event of power loss, including building systems, medical devices and IT applications, and monitoring capabilities that maintain the lives of many patients in residence. And, most critically, hospitals need to consider the imperative of HIPAA-compliant data backup and disaster recovery options that they can rely on during these emergency situations. While utility power has proven to be highly scalable and reliable throughout most parts of the United States, backup on-site generators have had a more mixed record. These assets require large fixed-cost investments, have limited capacity, and in the event of insufficient power or loss of service may be subject to aggressive surge pricing from suppliers.