Proper Enterprise Administration in Healthcare IT
Proper Enterprise Administration in Healthcare IT
A critical part of IT services is the proactive monitoring and administration of all hospital infrastructure and application technology. This includes network devices, servers, storage, network circuits, interfaces and in some cases applications and job/batch processes. When systems experience failures, it is critical that monitoring agents quickly trap the event and escalate based on established rules in the monitoring application. It’s important these rules are properly defined and configured for the hospital environment being services. Systems and devices attached to the hospital network should be properly identified and monitored based on criticality to the delivery of patient care and stable hospital operations. This includes the following:
Hardware Monitoring – IBM Director, HP Insight Manager type functionality that reports the status of hardware componets such as power supplies, fans, adapters and disk to ensure all fault tolerant componets are properly managed.
Comprehensive performance and capacity monitoring – Nagios, NetIQ and HP Openview based tools to track CPU, memory, I/O and other vital performance metrics for performance and capacity management. This tools must be configured to identify performance bottlenecks, failures and be useful in the root cause analysis process.
Operating System administration - this includes patching, security updates, anti-virus, security administration and disk management are vital to maintaining healthly servers and applications.
Storage monitoring and administration - monitoring SAN fabrics, storage devices, server HBA, disk and disk controller firmware levels, as well as file system, logical volumes, volume groups and other vital storage architecture are a crtical part of administration.
Network monitoring and administration – this type of monitoring and administration should identify slow or failing components in the network topology including circuits, core and edge devices. This should also include route analytics and the performance and health of protocols utilized on the network. Proactively monitoring the network can help ensure small problems do not evolve into large outages.
Database monitoring and administration – monitoring databases is a critical part of application health. Keeping track of performance from several aspects of the database can ensure proper tuning and the detailed forensics necessary for troubleshooting performance and corruption problems.
For example, the lost of a single hard drive in a RAID 5 environment will not result in the loss of service, but it does result in a loss of redundancy. If corrective action isn’t taken the next failure will result in a loss of service. Monitoring and proper escallation is critical to maintaining the proper fault tolerance and stability.
It is unacceptable for a medical IT devices or systems that are connected to the network to have inadequate protection, with little or no system monitoring or administration, and lack of processes to monitor, alert and correct problems in a timely fashion.
It’s just as unacceptable to have a new systems introducted into a clinical environment without inventory, inspection, and administration. Healthcare IT systems must be properly maintained and secured.
Issues
The issues paramount to healthcare IT is security, protection, quality, all directly impact customer satisfaction
• Security: is patient data secured and protected? Properly backed up? Operating System properly patched? Network monitored and systems protected from virus and other malicious applications?
• Cost: without a valid backup, restoring service can take time, money and possibly result in cancelled cases and loss of patient data and a damaged reputation.
• Quality: loss of patient data, delayed diagnosis, treatment, duplication of exams that can affect the care of quality of services provided.
• Customer Satisfaction: Downtime results in cancelled cases, delays in diagnosis and treatments, aggravating patients, physicians and the departments.
The IT Toolbox
Many of the tools required to support healthcare IT are already deployed and providing excellent services, and some of these tools are deployed but not configured to there potential. As IT leadership it’s of paramount importance to have complete visibility into the health of your client’s environment and take immediate corrective action when gaps are identified. Areas to focus include, but are not limited to:
• Backup and recovery / Disaster Recovery
• Patch management solutions
• Antivirus
• Network analysis
• Directory services / account security
• HL-7 and DICOM interfaces
• Proper documentation / diagrams
• HIPAA compliance
• Real-time monitoring and notification rules
• Reporting capabilities, generating useful reports
• Asset management for servers, desktops and network
• Management of bio-medical devices (if in scope)
Continuous improvement is vital to our continued advancement of healthcare IT services. What is the situation at your site? How can processes or technology solutions improve the health of your IT infrastructure?
A critical part of IT services is the proactive monitoring and administration of all hospital infrastructure and application technology. This includes network devices, servers, storage, network circuits, interfaces and in some cases applications and job/batch processes. When systems experience failures, it is critical that monitoring agents quickly trap the event and escalate based on established rules in the monitoring application. It’s important these rules are properly defined and configured for the hospital environment being services. Systems and devices attached to the hospital network should be properly identified and monitored based on criticality to the delivery of patient care and stable hospital operations. This includes the following:
Hardware Monitoring – IBM Director, HP Insight Manager type functionality that reports the status of hardware componets such as power supplies, fans, adapters and disk to ensure all fault tolerant componets are properly managed.
Comprehensive performance and capacity monitoring – Nagios, NetIQ and HP Openview based tools to track CPU, memory, I/O and other vital performance metrics for performance and capacity management. This tools must be configured to identify performance bottlenecks, failures and be useful in the root cause analysis process.
Operating System administration - this includes patching, security updates, anti-virus, security administration and disk management are vital to maintaining healthly servers and applications.
Storage monitoring and administration - monitoring SAN fabrics, storage devices, server HBA, disk and disk controller firmware levels, as well as file system, logical volumes, volume groups and other vital storage architecture are a crtical part of administration.
Network monitoring and administration – this type of monitoring and administration should identify slow or failing components in the network topology including circuits, core and edge devices. This should also include route analytics and the performance and health of protocols utilized on the network. Proactively monitoring the network can help ensure small problems do not evolve into large outages.
Database monitoring and administration – monitoring databases is a critical part of application health. Keeping track of performance from several aspects of the database can ensure proper tuning and the detailed forensics necessary for troubleshooting performance and corruption problems.
For example, the lost of a single hard drive in a RAID 5 environment will not result in the loss of service, but it does result in a loss of redundancy. If corrective action isn’t taken the next failure will result in a loss of service. Monitoring and proper escallation is critical to maintaining the proper fault tolerance and stability.
It is unacceptable for a medical IT devices or systems that are connected to the network to have inadequate protection, with little or no system monitoring or administration, and lack of processes to monitor, alert and correct problems in a timely fashion.
It’s just as unacceptable to have a new systems introducted into a clinical environment without inventory, inspection, and administration. Healthcare IT systems must be properly maintained and secured.
Issues
The issues paramount to healthcare IT is security, protection, quality, all directly impact customer satisfaction
• Security: is patient data secured and protected? Properly backed up? Operating System properly patched? Network monitored and systems protected from virus and other malicious applications?
• Cost: without a valid backup, restoring service can take time, money and possibly result in cancelled cases and loss of patient data and a damaged reputation.
• Quality: loss of patient data, delayed diagnosis, treatment, duplication of exams that can affect the care of quality of services provided.
• Customer Satisfaction: Downtime results in cancelled cases, delays in diagnosis and treatments, aggravating patients, physicians and the departments.
The IT Toolbox
Many of the tools required to support healthcare IT are already deployed and providing excellent services, and some of these tools are deployed but not configured to there potential. As IT leadership it’s of paramount importance to have complete visibility into the health of your client’s environment and take immediate corrective action when gaps are identified. Areas to focus include, but are not limited to:
• Backup and recovery / Disaster Recovery
• Patch management solutions
• Antivirus
• Network analysis
• Directory services / account security
• HL-7 and DICOM interfaces
• Proper documentation / diagrams
• HIPAA compliance
• Real-time monitoring and notification rules
• Reporting capabilities, generating useful reports
• Asset management for servers, desktops and network
• Management of bio-medical devices (if in scope)
Continuous improvement is vital to our continued advancement of healthcare IT services. What is the situation at your site? How can processes or technology solutions improve the health of your IT infrastructure?
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