Disaster Recovery Solution for PACS and Health Care Business Systems

Stonebridge has partnered with industry-leading providers of technology and services to offer a revolutionary, complete solution—which can be implemented in modular fashion—for the challenges facing health care organizations looking to develop or improve Disaster Recovery (DR) preparedness for PACS as well as business systems.

Robust and Pragmatic Solution

Stonebridge’s solution wraps robust Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Planning techniques and a pragmatic approach around a set of unique technology offerings which:

• Most importantly, help keep the mission of patient care going, even after major IT disruptions
• Help meet IT requirements for regulatory codes and accreditation specifications
• Addresses the challenge of managing the explosive growth of PACS data and other “fixed content”
• Addresses the need to protect, and, in event of disruption, quickly restore, business applications and data
• Addresses the challenges in staff time, availability, and specific expertise and experience
• Offers the option to “bundle in” facility services for standby and/or co-operational systems
• Offers the option to “bundle in” term-based, Service Level Agreement-driven professional services for database and infrastructure support
• May be implemented in phases, allowing greatest needs and/or greatest potential benefits to be prioritized
• Is built around a robust reference architecture, which allows for consistency of implementation, monitoring, and metrics
• Help optimize BC budgets and expenditures

Reference Architecture Based

Stonebridge’s approach is built around our reference architecture, which makes use of revolutionary yet inexpensive technologies developed expressly to address fixed content (e.g., PACS) archive and recall needs and whole application protection and restoration needs.

Expert DR Plan Development

The centerpiece of Stonebridge’s solution includes expert DR Plan development, which both helps provide the organization with an action plan for emergency response as well as adapts our reference architecture for the client’s specific needs. Our reference architecture makes use of IBM’s “grid” storage approach, developed specifically for medical and life sciences customers, to efficiently manage PACS and fixed content and industry-best storage virtualization to enable whole-application recovery—allowing the restoration, in just a few minutes, the restoration of mission critical applications and their data, even following catastrophic failure.

The reference architecture adds to world-class storage with the following features:

• Efficient multiple-copies, multi-site management of content, optimized for recall (the reason for archiving, in the first place)
• Intrinsic Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) and Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) features
• Virtually infinite capacity
• Infinitely scalable storage virtualization, with application state and application data consistency protection
• Unique "snapshot of a snapshot" capability that allows clients to never be without protection, even during failure testing and/or planned service windows
• PACS application awareness

To further enhance the effectiveness of developed DR plans and implemented architectures, Stonebridge offers clients the option to add:

• Arrangement for co-location and/or managed systems services, providing data center facilities and services for co-active or standby storage and systems, including the grid storage nodes
• Arrangements for ongoing, term-based expert professional services to help clients meet and maintain
• Service Level Agreements.

Consultants in Stonebridge’s Disaster Recovery Planning/Business Continuity Planning (DRP/BCP) Practice are trained in the “Professional Practices for Business Continuity Professionals”, as defined by the Disaster Recovery Institute International (DRII), including the critical “Business Impact Analysis” and “Emergency Response and Operations”. Stonebridge adds its own real world-proven enhancements to this classic, industry-standard methodology.

Stonebridge consultants seek to understand customers’ business processes, collecting BC requirements through both interactive techniques and observation. These requirements become the basis for the development of plans which seek to enable an organization’s ability to, under emergency and recovery conditions, continue execution or quickly resume execution of business processes. Our Database consultants average 17 years of experience; infrastructure consultants average 24 years of experience.

For more information about Stonebridge's DR services for health care organizations, and to request a copy of the Stonebridge white paper "Reducing Risks to Revenue in Health Care: The Impact of IT Disaster Planning," contact us at healthinfo@sbti.com. Please include your contact information in your e-mail request.