Medical data storage in demand after disasters

~ Paper records destroyed by fires, flood or wind can leave some patients in trouble.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- When Hurricane Katrina flooded the basements and records rooms of New Orleans hospitals this summer, desperately ill patients faced rebuilding their medical histories from scratch.

For 3,500 HIV-positive patients at the Medical Center of Louisiana at New Orleans, the possibilities were even more dire as physicians treating them in shelters and hospitals across the nation couldn't prescribe treatment until they knew what medicines they had taken in the past to avoid combinations to which the virus had grown resistant.

Fortunately for the patients and their caregivers, those lists and other records were sitting safely on computer servers north of New Orleans in Baton Rouge and were available within a week of the disaster.

"That's a good feeling to be able to give that response because so many people read or saw on TV about the destruction of paper records," said Dr. Michael Kaiser, associate chief medical officer for the Louisiana State University Health Care Services Division. "They will call us looking for partial information, and they're surprised by how much we can provide."

The health care industry already understands the limits of paper and is slowly changing to computerized records to track patients' care. But Katrina showed that even electronic records are vulnerable, forcing medical groups to consider shipping that data to warehouses far from danger or even handing over the job of running their networks to third parties.

Companies that provide those services say they have noticed increased interest in disaster recovery systems and offsite data storage since Katrina.

Kansas City-based Cerner Corp. said it plans next year to build a second data center to complement a Lee's Summit, Mo., facility that stores computer records for 80 clients around the country and remotely operates medical records systems for 75.

Jump in clients expected

Company president Earl "Trace" Devanny III said Cerner had the center in mind even before the storm, but with data center revenue already leading the company's divisions, he expects a huge jump in clients in the near future.

"It's much easier to sell disaster recovery after a major natural disaster," he said. "It does put a spotlight on the flaws in your system."

Alpha Systems, a Huntingdon Valley, Pa., company that provides records backup for both the health care and legal communities, said it is expanding its resources and network speeds to accommodate a likely increase in business.

"We've seen a need here because we serve hospitals in New England and they had some terrible flooding," said company President Brett Griffith. "They'll typically use their basements for storage because it's cheap, and that's the first part that floods."

Disaster recovery for computer data can take many forms. It can be as simple as periodically saving the records on computer tapes or CD-ROMs and then storing those files in a separate, secure location. Or it can be as complex as building a separate computer network that the hospital or a third party can operate from miles away even if the hospital itself is shut down.

Dr. Thomas Handler, research director for technology consultant Gartner Inc., said the disaster, as well as similar hurricanes last year, have forced health care groups to catch up with other industries that have long understood the importance of protecting themselves from losing information as an element of customer relations.

"Traditionally, health care hasn't been doing well with disaster recovery," Handler said. "But now they're starting to worry more about what happens if you lose that information. People expect you not to have access to paper records, but they don't expect you not to have access to electronic records."

Mike Kappel, senior vice president of government strategy and industry relations for McKesson Provider Technologies, said his company, which supplies systems to a third of the nation's hospitals, has seen an increasing number of hospitals considering outsourcing their medical records systems entirely.

He said many customers are also improving their communications networks, which went down during the hurricane, separating them from their carefully protected data.

"Things that looked like a good idea before Katrina got tested in ways that people hadn't thought about," Kappel said, adding that his company is now developing records protection products aimed at the limited budget and technological know-how of smaller clinics and physician solo practices.