I think this will serve as an excellent test for the local contingency plans for catastrophic failrues. As an example, as the VA moves more and more toward centralizing their databases, this sort of thing becomes more and more of serious an issue. This is one of the reasons that I am not in favor or purely ASP solutions with no local backup or operational capability for even small clinics.
Paper backup is, of course, always an option in a non-critical setting, but in a hospital that has to continue critical care with need for access to existing data, for pharmacy, etc., at least until transfer of that critical data to paper, there needs to be a local, battery and generator backed up system. The flip side of this is what happens if the central data repository fails if the local sites do not have backup operational capabilities? We have been thinking in terms of terrorism a lot lately, not mother nature as "terrorist", but it matters little what is causing the problem in the last analysis. Terrorists speak of causing the maximum economic disruption for the US as a goal, and causing a catastrophic power or communications failure is likely high on their list. Local backup could at least temporarily deal with this sort of problems until there is no fuel to keep the generators going. Roy, you have lived through a minor version of this at Bay Pines so I know you know much better than most of us what they are facing now and in the days to come in the wake of Katrina. ------------------------------------------------------- SF.Net email is Sponsored by the Better Software Conference & EXPO September 19-22, 2005 * San Francisco, CA * Development Lifecycle Practices Agile & Plan-Driven Development * Managing Projects & Teams * Testing & QA Security * Process Improvement & Measurement * http://www.sqe.com/bsce5sf _______________________________________________ Hardhats-members mailing list Hardhats-members@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/hardhats-members
