Does your hospital have the technology, resources, and a plan in place to meet today's business continuity challenges? A Spok survey of CHIME CIOs asked how confident healthcare leaders are in their organization's ability to recover from a disaster. Survey results show seven in ten CIOs are only 'somewhat' or 'not very' confident their hospital could recover from a disaster.

1. 7 MUST-ASK QUESTIONS:
WHAT HEALTHCARE LEADERS WANT
YOU TO KNOW ABOUT BUSINESS
CONTINUITY

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AGENDA
What is business continuity?
CHIME survey results
Harris Health System background
Hurricane Harvey
Questions

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WHAT IS BUSINESS CONTINUITY?
Proactive
approach
Reactive
approach
Focusing on how you’ll
resume business after
operations have ceased
or recovery begins.
Focusing on how to keep
your hospital operational
before, during, and after a
disaster.

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BUSINESS CONTINUITY SURVEY
Does your hospital have the technology, resources, and a plan in place
to meet today’s business continuity challenges?
Issued in January 2018
Collected 41 responses
from CHIME CIOs

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INTRODUCTION
Tracy Roberts
Senior Call Center Manager, Operator Services
9 years at Harris Health System
Judy Martinez
Supervisor of Operator Services
8 years at Harris Health System

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HARRIS HEALTH SYSTEM
• Fully integrated healthcare system caring for
residents of Harris County, Texas
• Recognized as a Patient-Centered Medical Home
by the National Committee for Quality Assurance
• Affiliations with 2 academic medical programs
– Baylor College of Medicine
– The University of Texas Health Science Center at
Houston
• Comprised of 18 community health centers
Ben Taub Hospital
Lyndon B. Johnson Hospital

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CHALLENGES
Missing a source of truth – directory pulled information from multiple sources1
Directory was being manually updated2
No back up system6
Paper-based on-call schedules5
Paging manually via phone – no text pages4
Manually processing over 100,000 pages and directory calls each month3

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RESULTS
Reduced call processing time by 20-30%
Eliminated paging errors
Access on-call schedules via web and from home
Established disaster recovery location

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BUSINESS CONTINUITY PLAN
• Created a “disaster recovery” (DR)
room
– 2nd floor of hospital
– 3 fully functional computers with
phones and Spok software
– Systems are tested once a month
• Copy of the database on each
workstation
– All operator functions on one platform

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HURRICANE HARVEY
“Harvey to be one of the
costliest natural disasters in
U.S. history”
“Hurricane Harvey Strikes a
Powerful Blow to Texas, and
Lingers”
“Hurricane Harvey brings
devastation to Texas”
Photo credit: foxnews.com Photo credit: theatlantic.com

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HURRICANE HARVEY
• Saturday, August 26th: Operators were told to
evacuate the basement immediately
• Operators initiated a code and moved to the DR
room
– Signed back on and handling calls within 15-20
minutes
• By Wednesday, August 30th all 15 workstations
were up and running in the DR room

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Hallway outside of the basement office Disaster recovery office
Stairway to the basement

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Views from the Hospital

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HURRICANE HARVEY
• Operators had minor issues with their
phones and computers, but no issues
with their Spok system
• Robust Spok system ensured that
there was no downtime that impacted
operations
• Seamless process – Members of the
leadership team didn’t even realize
that the operators had been relocated
Future plans: Establish an additional off-site disaster recovery location

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LET’S GET IN TOUCH!
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