What if your laptops quit talking to your server?
What if your laptops quit talking to your server?
Flexibility solves the unexpected
The 22 laptops were working fine. Data were being entered, nurses were visiting patients, and everyone was thrilled with the newly installed electronic health record system. At least that's what everyone believed until nurses started to report that data they transmitted the night before weren't showing up in the records.
"Everyone thinks about planning for a server to crash or for the electricity to be out, but we had a problem that most people don't include in emergency plans for information technology," says Melody Lahann, MS, MHCA, director of education at St. John Home Health and Hospice in Tulsa, OK. "We were not able to get any information off our laptop computers," she recalls.
The laptops were unable to communicate with the hospice server or any other computer in the system, Lahann explains. The only way to fix the laptops was to replace the database, but that action would erase all notes made by the nurses on the days when the problem occurred, Lahann says. "Before we replaced the databases, we had to recover the data," she says.
Fortunately, when her agency decided to implement electronic health records, the first service for implementation was hospice, the smallest service of the agency, Lahann points out.
"We only had 22 laptops to handle, but it took five staff members working four days in a row to plan and conduct the data recovery," she explains.
The problem was identified on a Friday afternoon when nurses began to report that they knew they were not synchronized because they were missing pieces of information that should have appeared, says Lahann. The problem was investigated, and the software vendor tried various fixes with no success. "We started identifying what data we needed off the laptops and how we were going to retrieve it," she says.
Because the problem was identified just before a weekend, Lahann and the staff members who were working with her on the recovery had two days over the weekend to plan how they would retrieve the data. "Luckily, the nurses who work on the weekends did not have their laptops connected to the server when the problem arose, so their laptops were working," she says.
What caused the problem? "Human error," says Lahann. "We have a procedure in place that any updates to software and to our database have to be approved by specific people," she explains. However, two people, one with the software vendor and one on the agency staff, decided to proceed with a change that made sense to both of them. "If proper procedure had been followed, our information technology director would have stopped the process because we don't touch the database when it is in use," she explains.
They also have a strict protocol that they test any new updates in a test environment that doesn't affect users or the existing database, Lahann adds. "It's a pain in the neck, but the process reduces the risk of major problems."
The 22 laptops were working fine. Data were being entered, nurses were visiting patients, and everyone was thrilled with the newly installed electronic health record system. At least that's what everyone believed until nurses started to report that data they transmitted the night before weren't showing up in the records.Subscribe Now for Access
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