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Be Prepared
February 1, 2008
Early in the morning on Monday, Oct. 22, one question was on the minds of executives at Palomar Pomerado Health: Which way would the wind blow?
Wildfires had begun to threaten the area near the 107-bed Pomerado Hospital and the 129-bed skilled nursing facility Villa Pomerado, both based in Poway, Calif. Another wrinkle: The delivery system’s data center is located at Pomerado Hospital. If the winds shifted, all the facilities could be in trouble.
The threat of wildfires isn’t new for hospitals in Southern California. Executives at Palomar Pomerado and Sharp Healthcare both say similar wildfires in 2003 provided them with lessons learned that helped them get through the events last year. And while they survived the October fires without much interruption, they learned some new lessons.
For example, Palomar executives discovered they needed to add more details to emergency checklists, which proved inadequate. And they are attempting to find an alternative to mobile phones, which proved unreliable during the fires. Leaders at Sharp, meanwhile, discovered that a Web site and pagers are extremely helpful tools during a disaster.
Not a Priority?
Unfortunately, disaster preparedness is still not on the top of “to do” lists for many health care organizations, says Tom Walsh, an Overland Park, Kan.-based independent health care consultant who focuses on data security and disaster recovery planning. After a disaster gets news coverage, executives will think about their level of readiness, but the issue doesn’t stay “top of mind” for very long.
“It becomes a blip on the radar screen, but it disappears before they do anything about it,” Walsh says. “Health care organizations recognize the need for it, but it doesn’t take a high priority over projects such as electronic health records.”
Pomerado had put some time into its disaster planning in the wake of the wildfires in 2003, says Luba Halich, information security officer at the delivery system. So when executives made the decision to evacuate 200 patients from the two facilities early on Oct. 22, they followed the carefully orchestrated plan.
While transportation was being arranged for the patients, Halich contacted SunGard, the hospital’s Philadelphia-based disaster recovery vendor.
Because the delivery system’s data center was on site at Pomerado, executives were concerned it would have to be shut down. That site hosts the Millennium health information system from Kansas City, Mo.-based Cerner, and other core applications for the organization’s four other facilities. If the data center had to be shut down for any extended period, there was a risk of data loss. Systems would have to be re-established from magnetic tape backups at SunGard headquarters, Halich says.
Meanwhile, the patient evacuations were under way as the fires were getting closer to Pomerado Hospital.
“The fires were bearing down on the hillside about 500 yards away,” says Andy Hoang, manager of communications and media relations at Palomar Pomerado Health. “Helicopters were nearby making water drops; it was a stressful situation,” Hoang says. “We didn’t sense the enormity of it until the last patient was taken away.”
Information for the patients who were evacuated to other facilities was printed out and brought with them, Halich says. Many of those patients were taken to 169-bed Sharp Mary Birch Hospital in San Diego. To accommodate the patients, the hospital had to open two floors that had been closed off, says Bill Spooner, CIO and senior vice president at Sharp Healthcare, parent company of the hospital. The biggest task for the I.T. department was modifying its network to tell the computer system that these floors existed.
The San Diego hospital did most of the clinical charting for these transferred patients on paper. For billing purposes, the beds had to be created in the system, Spooner says. It took 20 staff members the better part of a day to finish that job.
After the evacuation, an I.T. staff er and security guard stayed behind at Pomerado Hospital, Hoang says. Helicopters continued to make massive water drops in the area and managed to push the fire line west so it never got closer than 500 yards.
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