Part I – End to End Availability: Achieving Uptime and Managing Downtime

Mary Finlay, Deputy CIO, Partners HealthCare, Boston, Gayle Simkin, CIO, and Nancy Staggers, RN, PhD, CHW, San Francisco, Rich Pollack, interim CIO, Clarian Health, Indianapolis, and George Brenckle, CIO, University of Pennsylvania Health System, Philadelphia, conduct a 2 part panel discussion on the impact of clinical system downtime and successful management practices. Part I includes approaches for achieving optimal uptime: network and system assessments, mirroring systems, vendor service contracts and education and training matters, evaluating our dependence on networks and inter-application communication. Part II, on March 1, addresses policies, procedures, processes and cultural solutions to manage downtime workflow when it occurs. Included are activities and communications that need to occur when there is an outage, assessing  the ability of individual departments or practices to function during a system outage, why there is variability in coping skills, and what can be done to smooth the operations during an incident.