Hospital operation is smooth during blackout
But event sparked look at IS location
It was pretty close to business as usual for New York Presbyterian Hospital during the electrical blackout that hit a large swath of the northeastern United States in August 2003, but with one important realization gained, says Bill Greene, vice president for professional services. From the public’s perception, he notes, registration and other processes proceeded normally, except that lights were dimmed to save generator power and elective surgeries were canceled. "I was incident commander, and we had a flawless event," Green adds. "We treated it as an internal disaster, and we were on generator power, with all of our patient care and treatment areas on full power."
But he says the incident caused him to seriously question the location of the organization’s information systems (IS) department blocks away from the main hospital campus. "One interesting nuance is that we’re at 68th Street and East River, and our server farm is at 38th Street in Midtown," he says. "[The IS department] has a backup generator of course, but the logistics in convincing the diesel fuel tankers that they had to give priority delivery in Midtown were interesting, because they were [giving priority] to hospitals."
Greene says he was able to explain the situation to those in charge of fuel distribution so that the IS department’s generator kept going, but there was a lag time between when the hospital regained normal power and when the server farm was back on line. "The hospital itself obtained full power at about 2 in the afternoon, but lower Manhattan didn’t have it until 7 or 8 at night," he adds, because the power company was doing a progressive rollout of service.
As a result of the blackout, Greene says, "I was looking through the retrospective scope and questioning the wisdom of putting the IS department some 30 blocks away and whether we would be better served for it to be on our campus powered by our generators."
During the emergency situation, he points out, the hospital’s IS department was the only occupant of the commercial building in which it is located. "I’m concerned about keeping service up and running, and also about 50 of our employees in an otherwise unoccupied building."
"I am strongly advocating the relocation of the IS department back to the main campus of the hospital," Greene adds. As for the other parts of the blackout scenario, he notes, "this was just one of those things that happened, and we didn’t lose a bit of patient data or of functionality. We were up and operational throughout."
It was pretty close to business as usual for New York Presbyterian Hospital during the electrical blackout that hit a large swath of the northeastern United States in August 2003, but with one important realization gained: The information systems department was located too far from the main campus.
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