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Ensuring Operational Continuity in Elderly Care Organizations: 4 Essential IT Investments
Learn how IT failures lead to critical care failures at elderly care organizations, what investments are both cost-effective and most impactful, and some solutions to help you move forward.
It’s a typical day. Staff bustles to take care of 85 residents—checking in on them, helping them with daily activities, ensuring they take their medications, coordinating visits from loved ones, and so much more. As usual, you’re understaffed, and so everyone is maintaining happy demeanors while feeling stress and strain on the inside.
Then, the computers go down. Again.
One more straw on the camel’s back. While your IT manager attempts to figure out what’s wrong, your staff mutter to themselves in the break room, tired of the same old, same old. Old servers, old computers, old network infrastructure. They complain that they’re once again unable to reliably give out medication, access resident records, and do their reports.
The downtime bleeds into the next day as you call a break-fix vendor that you bill hourly as needed to resolve problems beyond the IT manager’s skillset. Unfortunately, you must wait until the next day for someone to visit and assess the problem.
Now, your staff is worried. Workarounds and temporary paper records put the residents at risk, and staff feel like they’re walking a tightrope to make sure their care activities don’t suffer. All it will take is one big mistake—incorrect medication leading to a medical incident, an oversight about a resident’s medical care, a missed alert—to forever damage your reputation.
In fact, residents are already beginning to talk to their loved ones about yet another technical issue affecting their care. Complaints by phone and email start coming in, with threats to move their relatives to another elderly care facility.
After the problem is fixed, more than 48 hours later, staff don’t celebrate. They just fear the next time it will happen.
Does any of this sound familiar to you? If so, keep reading.
What's Inside this Essential IT Investments Guide?
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1
How IT Failures Lead to Critical Care Failures at Elderly Care Organizations
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2
Developing a backup and disaster recovery (BDR) plan
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3
Implementing redundant and resilient IT infrastructure
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4
Establishing a baseline cybersecurity posture
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5
Proactively monitoring and managing your network
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6
Reimagine Your Typical Day…Without Disruption and Disaster
Short on Time? Download the PDF ⬇️
How IT Failures Lead to Critical Care Failures at Elderly Care Organizations
IT always seems abstract and invisible until disruption occurs. Yet, elderly care organizations white knuckle their way down a bumpy road, skirting but always at risk for disasters, putting off a long-term solution with typical excuses—budget, staffing issues, other priorities. But kicking the can down the road too many times introduces serious risks.
Critical care disruption affects patient safety and well-being.
Elderly residents often require continuous medical care and monitoring. Any disruption in these services can directly threaten their health and safety. For example, access to Electronic Medical Records (EMR) is essential for administering correct medications at the right times. Disruptions can lead to missed doses or incorrect medication, which can have severe consequences for elderly patients. Critical medical records can also become inaccessible, delaying or complicating patient care.
Operational disruption affects staff and daily activities.
Effective staff communication and coordination are essential for providing high-quality care. Disruptions can lead to confusion, inefficiency, and errors in care delivery—impeding communication among staff, making it difficult to coordinate care and manage shifts effectively. Regular care activities, such as feeding, bathing, and therapy sessions, can be interrupted, negatively impacting the physical and emotional well-being of residents. Frequent or prolonged disruptions can also lead to higher stress levels among staff, affecting performance, morale, and turnover.
Financial disruptions impact the bottom line.
Extended downtime can halt operations, leading to significant financial losses due to the inability to admit new residents or provide billed services. The costs associated with emergency responses, recovery efforts, and potential legal liabilities also strain financial resources. Organizations without adequate disaster recovery and business continuity plans face higher insurance premiums, difficulties obtaining insurance, and high costs if an incident occurs.
Reputational damage impacts the bottom line.
Families and the community trust elderly care organizations to provide safe and reliable care. Any failure to maintain services can erode this trust and damage the organization’s reputation. Plus, many regulatory bodies require comprehensive disaster recovery and business continuity plans. Non-compliance can result in fines, legal actions, and further damage to the organization's reputation.
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Many times, the root cause of uptime issues is a lack of IT and cybersecurity investments. Yet, we understand the struggle of tight budgets, requiring a need to prioritize what to address and improve first.
This guide will cover the 4 most critical areas that elderly care organizations should address first to increase uptime, create a more reliable network infrastructure, and improve business continuity.
1. Develop a backup and disaster recovery (BDR) plan—or revise your current plan.
It’s important to start with a worst-case
scenario—a disaster. How will you respond to a disaster that shuts down your IT infrastructure? What steps will you take to recover from a major disruption? Creating a plan or revising your current plan will help you identify risks, understand their impact on your elderly care organization, and clarify how you will recover in the event of a disaster.
Risk assessment and operational impact analysis
First, identify potential risks and vulnerabilities specific to your organization such as power outages, cyberattacks, natural disasters, hardware failures, etc. Then, determine the critical functions and services that must be maintained during a disaster while assessing the impact of downtime on your operations. As part of your assessment, look at your data and prioritize it by the impact of not having that data accessible or functional.
Recovery objectives
Establish Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) to define acceptable downtime and data loss limits.
- Recovery Time Objective: What is the maximum amount of time you can afford to have a system unavailable?
- Recovery Point Objective: How much data can you lose before it negatively affects your organization?
Data backup policies and procedures
Detail your data backup policies including:
- Frequency of backup: How often do you back up your data?
- Type of backup: Decide what type of backup fits your disaster recovery objectives—local, remote, cloud, hybrid, etc.
- Storage Capacity: Remember, the volume of healthcare data can grow rapidly, necessitating scalable backup solutions.
- Retention period: How long are you legally required to retain your data?
- Locations: How many locations need to be backed up?
- Incident Response: Describe the steps to recover critical systems, applications, and infrastructure.
For more information about a disaster recovery plan, read our Healthcare Disaster Recovery Guide.
2. Implement redundant and resilient IT infrastructure.
Back up your data.
- Use onsite local data backups to lessen time to recovery for smaller incidents (such as a server failure). An onsite backup solution can get you up and running again in minutes, which is crucial for minimizing downtime in the event of data loss or corruption.
- Use offsite data backup to plan for worst-case scenarios. Offsite means storing your data backups far from your geographical location. Storing backups offsite reduces the risk of losing all data due to a single catastrophic event affecting your primary location.
- Monitor and test your data backups. Otherwise, you won’t know if you have issues that will impact a full data restoration in the event of a disaster.
Leverage cloud solutions.
Use cloud services for data storage and applications to ensure accessibility from any location and facilitate quick recovery. A cloud solution does not rely on a local server that you need to purchase, maintain, and upgrade over its lifecycle. These costs add up if you have multiple sites or resident buildings all needing expensive infrastructure at each location. If you have an internet connection, you can access your cloud service. All maintenance, patching, and upgrades are handled by the vendor.
Cloud services remove one obstacle that hurts many elderly care organizations—the constant putting out of fires related to aging, obsolete hardware maintained by an overburdened IT person or team. The more you can move to the cloud to store your data and use applications there, the less burden you place on your team. Plus, even if a disaster or disruption hits, your data and applications are safe and accessible.
In some cases, you may have no choice because many EMR and EHR providers are moving their applications to the cloud. It’s important to note that most technology infrastructure and applications are shifting to the cloud, with on-premises hardware becoming the exception rather than the rule.
Ensure additional redundancy.
In addition to your data backups, implement other solutions to ensure redundancy for key infrastructure components such as:
- Dual internet connections: With dual internet, your organization has two independent internet connections from different Internet Service Providers (ISPs). This setup is designed to ensure continuous internet availability and improved network performance.
- Redundant network hardware: It’s wise to have duplicates of critical network devices such as routers, switches, and firewalls to take over if the primary device fails. This reduces the risk of network outages affecting business operations.
- Power redundancy: As backup power systems designed to provide electricity during power outages, Uninterruptible Power Supplies (UPSs) and generators are crucial for ensuring that critical business operations can continue without interruption when the primary power supply fails. By keeping servers, computers, and network devices powered, UPSs and generators help prevent data loss and corruption.
If you invest in the following three areas at a minimum, then you will tackle some essential low-hanging fruit that sets you up for a more successful cybersecurity strategy down the road.
1. Firewall Management
Most elderly care organizations will likely have a firewall, but it may be set up or managed in a way that compromises its effectiveness and leaves you vulnerable to cyberattacks.
- Incorrect Configuration: Incorrect configurations can allow unauthorized access, enable malware communication, and leave critical systems exposed.
- Not Changing Default Settings: Default settings are often well-known and easily exploited by attackers.
- Insufficient Logging and Monitoring: Logs are crucial for detecting and responding to security incidents. Without proper logging, suspicious activities may go unnoticed, delaying response times.
2. Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)
Antivirus alone is no longer enough to protect your endpoints (servers, desktop computers, laptops, etc.). The current baseline tool is EDR. Not only does it accomplish the work of traditional antivirus in preventing viruses and malware from infiltrating your network, but it also uses machine learning to detect anomalous behavior.
Why is this so important? Cyberattackers have grown more sophisticated in recent years, often using stolen credentials and software vulnerabilities to sneak past antivirus software and lie undetected inside your systems. Once inside, they can deploy malware or ransomware on their timetable. EDR is essential for detecting these cybercriminals before they can cause damage.
3. Software Patching
It’s scary how many organizations fail to patch or get very behind in patching. Software vulnerabilities are known to cyberattackers around the world. These criminals play a numbers game, assuming many organizations don’t patch, and scan systems until they find vulnerable devices. Often not caring about the type of organization they exploit, cyberattackers will mercilessly shut down the network of an elderly care organization with ransomware or malware without a second thought.
Software vendors regularly release patches and updates to fix known vulnerabilities. These updates contain security fixes that address the vulnerabilities discovered in their software. By regularly applying these patches and updates, you can protect your systems from known security threats.
Timely patching is critical because attackers often act quickly to exploit newly disclosed vulnerabilities. Organizations that delay applying patches are at a higher risk of falling victim to cyberattacks.
4. Proactively monitor and manage your network.
Many elderly care organizations have no IT person on staff, are understaffed, or rely on a reactive break-fix IT support vendor. In any of these scenarios, it’s unlikely that someone is proactively monitoring and managing your network.
With network monitoring and management, you can stay apprised about your network performance, identify issues long before they become disruptions, and ensure your network optimally functions.
Monitoring Tools
- Real-Time Monitoring: Automated tools continuously check the status of network components such as routers, switches, firewalls, servers, and other devices.
- Performance Tracking: Measure metrics like bandwidth usage, latency, packet loss, and error rates.
- Alerting: Set up alerts to notify administrators of potential issues or anomalies in your network.
- Diagnostics: Identify and diagnose network problems to minimize downtime and improve performance.
Managed Services
Consider outsourcing IT management to a managed services provider (MSP) that offers 24/7 monitoring, support, and maintenance. For a fixed monthly rate, you receive ongoing proactive support of your hardware, software, and network.
This is different from a “break/fix” support model. Many elderly care organizations simply fix issues as they arise—often temporarily and symptomatically. Then, the break-fix vendor goes away until the next fire. Seemingly cost-effective on the surface, billing you hourly can become expensive when problems are ongoing, fires happen often, and nothing ever really gets fixed at a root cause level.
In addition to network monitoring and management, IT managed services provides you:
- Helpdesk support: Includes 24/7 remote and onsite support.
- Endpoint management: MSPs monitor and manage desktops, laptops, and mobile devices, ensuring that all endpoints are updated with the latest security patches and software updates. They also keep track of IT assets for maintenance, compliance, and optimization purposes.
- Security services: Usually includes firewall management, endpoint detection and response (EDR), and software patching.
- Server, software, and application management: Includes regular updates, patching, and optimization to ensure performance and security. Application management often involves help with EMR / EHR support.
- IT consulting and strategy: MSPs can help you develop a strategic plan for IT infrastructure and services that align with business goals while assisting with budgeting and forecasting for IT expenditures.
Reimagine Your Typical Day…Without Disruption and Disaster
It’s a typical day. Staff bustles to take care of 85 residents—checking in on them, helping them with daily activities, ensuring they take their medications, coordinating visits from loved ones, and so much more. As usual, you’re understaffed, and so everyone is maintaining happy demeanors while feeling stress and strain on the inside.
But at least the computers no longer go down on a constant basis. That’s something.
Despite the normal stress of their jobs, employees can rely on their computers and tablets to access data, do their reports, and serve residents—staying on schedule with their residents’ medication, therapies, and activities.
When IT just works, it’s one less stressor for your staff. Servers, computers, network infrastructure, applications, and tools no longer creak and break all the time. Calling that break-fix vendor that came onsite all the time to fight fires is now a fading memory. Instead, employees occasionally have a tech issue that’s handled remotely—and quickly. IT monitoring and maintenance takes place in the background.
No more IT workarounds and shortcuts. Staff can lean hard on technology, especially when resident care becomes particularly demanding. Residents seem more positive, and family members compliment the elderly care organization’s quality of care. Complaints have dropped.
Does any of this sound familiar to you? If not, take action today to get there.
VC3 can help your elderly care organization with:
- Data Backup and Disaster Recovery: Prepare for worst-case scenarios with offsite data backup solutions that get you operational again within hours.
- Managed Security Services: Protect your organization with right-sized cybersecurity solutions.
- Managed Services: Get 24/7 support, eliminate disruptions, and keep IT costs predictable.
- Cloud File and Application Hosting: We provide a secure, compliant repository for your SharePoint, OneDrive, and Microsoft 365 files that reduces hardware costs and drives collaboration. In addition to your files, we can also host Microsoft 365 and other important applications critical to your business—assisting with your migration to the cloud.
Have additional questions? Concerns about your current business continuity at your elderly care organization? Contact us to talk with an IT specialist!
