Healthcare Organizations Focus on Disaster Recovery to Ensure Clinical Care Continuity
Healthcare organizations are increasingly prioritizing the development of comprehensive business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) plans to maintain clinical care during technological outages. These plans are designed to ensure that critical healthcare functions can continue even when digital systems fail. Franciscan Health, a 12-hospital system in Indiana and Illinois, has identified essential applications necessary for maintaining a 'minimum viable hospital' during such disruptions. This involves selecting key applications from a larger pool that are crucial for patient care, such as those used for scheduling, lab orders, and employee payments. The BCDR plans also emphasize the importance of training staff to operate without technology, using manual processes like whiteboards and paper forms. Additionally, these plans set recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO) to minimize downtime and data loss. 
