The Business Challenge
If there is a power failure at a hospital, lives are at stake. They rarely lose power because they have backup units and special arrangements with the power company, but nonetheless, there still needs to be a contingency plan in place.
There are also planned downtime events, where a system needs to be taken down to perform maintenance. Virginia Hospital needed a plan to cover both of these types of events.
Solution Considerations
The data needed to be extracted from the mainframe on a regular basis and frequently enough that it would be useful - once per hour. This data included information such as which patient was in which bed, or what medications they had been administered and when.
The data needed to be sent to a stand-alone computer that did not require anything but a backup power supply. It could not require any network or internet access to run reports (that were no older than 1 hour), and print them to a printer connected directly to it.
The reports needed to have all pertinent information about patients currently in a bed.
Technical Design
The Solution involved the following processes:
Once per hour, reports with patient and unit data were extracted from the mainframe
Individual pages were placed in a SQL database
Pages were pulled out in various order (by Patient or by Unit), and PDF documents generated
PDF documents were sent via SFTP to the standalone computer
A web page hosted on the standalone computer displayed links to the documents
A printer was connected to the computer, and the documents could be printed when a downtime event occurred
Solution's Impact on the Business
Hospital could meet regulatory requirements to have a downtime contingency plan
Hospital could function in the event of a scheduled downtime
Solution was relatively low in cost compared with other solutions
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