Catholic Health East, a multi-institutional Catholic health system, announced the purchase of NetSafe business continuance and downtime protection software from Interbit Data for 15 of its hospitals. The NetSafe software has been in place in Catholic Health East’s Saint Mary Medical Center in Langhorne, Pa., since 2007, providing them with seamless patient care during downtime. This success resulted in Catholic Health East brining NetSafe to hospitals across the East Coast.
NetSafe provides hospitals and healthcare organizations with downtime protection and business continuance, which is an especially valuable function as more and more hospitals adopt electronic health records. Downtime can occur for a number of reasons, including: natural disaster, system failure, necessary maintenance, or network outage.
President of Interbit Data, Arthur Young, commends Catholic Health East on their decision: “Catholic Health East recognizes the importance of establishing a system for disaster recovery and ensuring its critical patient information is easily and consistently available to its clinicians… NetSafe should be part of any healthcare facility's business continuance/downtime contingency plan to maintain continued operations and the delivery of quality patient care.”
Electronic Health Records (EHRs) store patient information that includes: medical history, age, weight, immunizations, medications, allergies, vital signs, radiology image, and billing information. With all of this information stored electronically, downtime can be crippling. CHE senior Project Management Specialist Lisa Shima sees NetSafe as the solution: “NetSafe is a straightforward solution that will make it easy for clinicians to access patient-centric reports in a timely manner and continue delivering quality patient care.”
Catholic Health East has 35 acute care hospitals, four long-term acute care hospitals, 26 freestanding and hospital-based long-term care facilities, 12 assisted-living facilities, four continuing care retirement communities, eight behavioral health and rehabilitation facilities, and 31 home health agencies. The hospitals that will be integrating the NetSafe system are located in Florida, Georgia, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and Pennsylvania. Whether or not the remaining hospitals in their system will integrate the NetSafe system in the future has not yet been announced.
Edited by
Carrie Schmelkin
