McKesson: DR Services to Help Hospitals Assure IT System Availability

From tornados, floods and earthquakes to human-caused catastrophes such as malware and data security attacks, disasters can take many forms.

To help healthcare organizations maintain their mission-critical capabilities when the unexpected occurs, McKesson Corporation has launched a tiered offering of cost-efficient DR services that can be scaled to fit the needs and budgets of smaller to average-sized hospitals.

A study showed that 73% of healthcare IT executives don’t believe their organizations are fully prepared to ensure continuous availability of patient data during unplanned system outages or disasters ⁽¹⁾. Additionally, the average cost for healthcare organizations that have experienced an unplanned outage in the past 12 months was $432,000 per incident ⁽¹⁾.

“Healthcare organizations today are faced with increasingly severe financial pressures and many are running leaner than ever,” commented Russell Smith, VP, McKesson Enterprise Information Solutions. “How many can afford to risk the patient care disruptions and financial repercussions that could result from an extended system downtime? Based on the conversations we have had with hospital CIOs, we believe that many do not have an adequate way to assess and mitigate the risks involved.“

Through its DR as a service model, the company provides a cost-efficient solution that delivers a replication and infrastructure recovery strategy for a healthcare organization’s virtual environment to help ensure that critical business data and systems will be safe and accessible. Unlike traditional solutions, firm’s DR Services (DRS) support most types of storage arrays, allowing organizations to replicate across multiple vendors and technologies.

Based on their needs and priorities, healthcare organizations can choose either company’s DRS Core or DRS Plus levels of service. DRS Core provides geo-redundant replication of an organization’s critical data. If a disaster is declared, costs are incurred according to hourly calculations in a ‘pay as you go’ model. The DRS Plus level includes all of the DRS Core services but also provides options for reserved resources and more detailed terms and commitments related to service level agreement values for recovery point objective (RPO) and RTO.

“Traditional DR solutions are expensive, difficult to manage and time-consuming to provision and support,” added Smith. “Many hospitals just can’t afford the staff expertise to develop and maintain them. We are pleased to offer a scalable solution that can help lower the TCO via economies of scale and delegation of specialized management responsibilities. This can help reduce the burden on the hospital’s onsite IT staff while offloading the responsibility to McKesson for recovering the infrastructure in the event of a declared disaster.“

The company introduced its DR Services offering as part of its broad range of healthcare IT solutions at the recent HIMSS16 conference in Las Vegas, NV.

⁽¹⁾ MeriTalk, Rx:ITaaS+Trust, February 3, 2014.