Redundancy and resilience are two foundational principles to ensure healthcare technology systems remain functional, particularly in the midst of challenges and disasters, like outbreaks and data breaches. This became apparent during the COVID-19 pandemic and the recent cybersecurity events earlier this year.
Establishing redundancy and resiliency in healthcare technology ensures sustained, comprehensive interoperability. This is critical to healthcare, where any system failure can have serious consequences for patient care. As healthcare becomes more digitized and interconnected, the complexities and potential vulnerabilities increase. This necessitates a stronger focus and shared responsibility to build resilience and redundancy in healthcare technology networks.
Building resilient and robust healthcare technology systems involves strengthening human resources, infrastructure and technological capacities. Investing in technology training for healthcare workers, building robust and resilient IT infrastructure and promoting interoperability will lead to improved sharing of clinical data and HIPAA-compliant claims management. This is specifically relevant in times of crisis.
At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, UHIN initiated real-time notifications from hospitals and labs in and around Utah that could be sent directly to healthcare providers, ACOs and care managers.
In response to the Change Health Care incident, UHIN immediately worked with health plans to expedite provider enrollment and get claims flowing again.
This focus on interoperability enabled all stakeholders to monitor and coordinate care more effectively for their patients, especially those in greater need of physician intervention.
The Benefits & Challenges of Interoperability in Disaster Recovery
The healthcare ecosystem relies on maintaining seamless operations in times of success and disaster. Let’s explore the benefits and challenges in more detail:
Benefits:
Data Accessibility and Availability: Interoperability in disaster recovery ensures that data remains accessible and available across different systems and organizations during and after a disaster. This capability enables timely decision-making, efficient coordination and effective response efforts.
Collaboration and Coordination: Disaster recovery for interoperability promotes collaboration and coordination among various entities involved in the recovery process. It allows different organizations, such as emergency responders, to share critical information, resources and expertise, thereby enhancing overall response effectiveness.
Rapid Information Exchange: Interoperability facilitates the rapid exchange of information between different systems and stakeholders. This enables real-time situational awareness, timely updates and the ability to make informed decisions based on accurate and up-to-date data.
Seamless Integration: Disaster recovery efforts that prioritize interoperability ensure seamless integration between disparate systems. This integration enables smooth data flow, eliminates information silos, and enhances the overall efficiency and effectiveness of the recovery process.
Challenges:
Technical Compatibility: Achieving interoperability in disaster recovery can be challenging due to the need for technical compatibility between different systems, platforms and protocols. Integrating legacy systems with newer technologies, addressing data format inconsistencies and ensuring seamless communication can require significant effort and resources.
Data Standardization: In disaster recovery scenarios, different organizations often use their own data standards, formats and terminology. Harmonizing and standardizing these diverse data elements can be complex and time-consuming. Without consistent data standards, interoperability may be compromised, leading to delays, miscommunication and errors.
Security and Privacy Concerns: Interoperability in disaster recovery requires the secure exchange of sensitive information among multiple entities. Ensuring data confidentiality, integrity and availability while maintaining privacy rights is a significant challenge.
Governance and Policy Alignment: Coordination and governance among multiple stakeholders are crucial for effective disaster recovery interoperability. Aligning policies, procedures and decision-making frameworks across different organizations can be complex, especially in large-scale disasters involving multiple jurisdictions and diverse stakeholders. Clear governance structures and collaborative frameworks must be established to overcome these challenges.
Conclusion:
We all must work together to develop robust solutions, enhance interoperability and ensure the resilience and reliability of recovery processes. While challenges persist, it’s important for organizations to work together to address these issues and ensure their capacity to adapt and evolve in response to new challenges and changing conditions. This means not only being able to respond effectively to immediate crises but also preparing for long-term changes and uncertainties. By taking a comprehensive and multifaceted approach, we can build healthcare technology systems that are robust, resilient and redundant in a way that meets the needs of everyone in healthcare.
Emily Olsen 
Ricky Zipp 
Susanna Vogel