A Leading Healthcare Provider Selected Healthcare Triangle’s (HCTI) AWS Cloud Services offerings to Improve Uptime of EHRs
Healthcare Triangle (HCTI) has partnered with Southeast Iowa Regional Medical Center to enhance the reliability of electronic health records (EHR) through improved disaster recovery solutions. Leveraging Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud capabilities, HCTI helped the provider achieve a significant 67% improvement in recovery times. The hospital, facing challenges with its previous system, now meets recovery objectives of 4 hours for recovery time objective (RTO) and 2 hours for recovery point objective (RPO), surpassing initial targets.
- Achieved a 67% improvement in EHR recovery times.
- Surpassed recovery objectives with RTO of 4 hours and RPO of 2 hours.
- Successfully implemented disaster recovery without disrupting hospital services.
- None.
Healthcare Triangle, Inc. (HCTI), one of the largest AWS premier partners, helped a comprehensive healthcare provider in Southeast Iowa to improve uptime and resilience of electronic health records
PLEASANTON, Calif., March 16, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Bringing together technical expertise and extensive AWS cloud expertise, Healthcare Triangle helped a leading healthcare provider improve its recovery times by
Southeast Iowa Regional Medical Center, a comprehensive medical services provider committed to providing its largely rural community with the same high-quality healthcare found in larger hospitals, faced challenges with its former disaster recovery system for their MEDITECH 6.x EHR platform. Losing access to MEDITECH EHR because of server corruption, human error, cyber-attack, natural disaster, or other disruption could have detrimental impact on the provider’s ability to care for patients. As Shane Tapper, systems executive of Information Systems of the integrated health system explained, “we were less confident in the data that we had as it was becoming more difficult to test the scenarios that needed to be tested.”
The client needed a disaster recovery solution that would address the following requirements: 1. The ability to conduct periodic, non-disruptive tests to validate the hospital’s recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO); 2. Improved recovery objectives — an RTO of 12 hours and an RPO of 4 hours; 3. Visibility into the health of all servers at any point in time; and 4. Support of MEDITECH EHR platform.
To improve the reliability and recovery capabilities of the hospital’s EHR platform, the provider reached out to Healthcare Triangle – an AWS Premier Partner that helps hospitals leverage the cloud for scalable, cost-effective, and secure backup and disaster recovery. HCTI recommended the use of Elastic Disaster Recovery to set up a secondary site on AWS cloud. Elastic Disaster Recovery is a highly automated service that minimizes downtime and data loss by continuously replicating on-premises and cloud-based applications into AWS, and quickly launching them in the case of an IT disruption.
According to Chris Paalman, Director of Engineering and Operations at Healthcare Triangle, “In MEDITECH space, there weren’t a lot of disaster recovery solutions out there that fit the bill. When we dug into the AWS cloud solution, we realized it was a great fit.” The way the MEDITECH application is structured meant that conventional file-level replication would not work. Elastic Disaster Recovery provides block-level replication of source servers into AWS, thus meeting this technical requirement.
As Manish Hindupur, VP of Cloud Services Delivery at Healthcare Triangle, explains, “When healthcare professionals update a patient's electronic medical record, only a small amount of data is modified. However, conventional replication typically replicates the entire file, which can be large Meditech files. Elastic Disaster Recovery replicates only the changes within the file, which can be done very quickly and enable us to meet the near real-time RPO requirement for the solution.”
In addition to near real-time RPOs, Elastic Disaster Recovery facilitated more robust RTOs. With the guidance of Healthcare Triangle, the healthcare provider set up and tested Elastic Disaster Recovery on 61 on-premises servers comprising 14 TB of data within just six weeks.
“I didn’t know what to expect, but it was easy to install, the console is very straightforward, and it was able to handle all those TBs of data, whereas our previous solution didn’t seem to be able to,” says Eric Morehouse, network operations manager, Southeast Iowa Regional Medical Center. “Elastic Disaster Recovery seemed to sync the data to AWS cloud flawlessly.” During the implementation, there was no disruption to the MEDITECH EHR application or any hospital services. “We were able to offload the entire solution without anyone outside of our team knowing what was going on. There was no impact on database times and no impact on internet connectivity,” reports Tapper. “If it’s not on the forefront, it means we’re doing it right.”
With its new disaster recovery solution in place, the healthcare provider now meets recovery objectives that are much better than they had expected. Whereas the requirements were an RTO of 12 hours and an RPO of 4 hours, the client has tested and verified that they can achieve an RTO of 4 hours and RPO of 2 hours.
In addition to better recovery objectives, the healthcare provider has benefitted from reliable, non-disruptive testing and follows the recommended best practice of creating an isolated network within AWS and using Elastic Disaster Recovery to launch a test failover of the MEDITECH application into that isolated environment.
The team also has ongoing visibility into the health of their disaster recovery environment. Morehouse explains, “I have access to the console, where I can see in real time where the data is. We also get alerts if replication has stalled on any machine. This is
Because ransomware attacks are becoming more widespread, especially in the healthcare sector, the information systems team appreciates that they can use Elastic Disaster Recovery to failover to a version of their source servers from a previous point in time, before a cyberattack has taken place. According to Tapper, “Point-in-time recovery was a nice benefit when we first looked at the product, but it’s starting to become a requirement given how large a target healthcare now is.”
Following their implementation of Elastic Disaster Recovery on AWS, the healthcare provider has much more confidence that the hospital will quickly recover from any unexpected IT disruptions. Their positive experience has led them to begin evaluating how they can use AWS moving forward. “The fact that we have gone through the process of setting up a recovery site on AWS, and have seen our data accessible in the cloud, eliminates some of the questions and hurdles that we may have had a few years ago,” says Tapper. “The long-term plan is to fully embrace the cloud.”
About Healthcare Triangle (HCTI)
Healthcare Triangle is a leading healthcare information technology company focused on advancing innovative, industry-transforming solutions in the areas of cloud services, data science, professional and managed services for the healthcare and life sciences industry. Healthcare Triangle is an AWS Partner.
About Southeast Iowa Regional Medical Center
Southeast Iowa Regional Medical Center is the only comprehensive healthcare provider in southeast Iowa. Although it serves a predominantly rural area that includes parts of Iowa, Illinois, and Missouri, it offers many of the same services found in larger hospitals. Its two main campuses are located in Fort Madison and West Burlington.
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