This goes for any critical information, not just hospitals.
By the way, even though I am a "computer geek", I keep my backup material on thumb drives and CD-ROMs. Those are kept off-site. My project records are ALL on paper stored in three ring binders. I'm old fashioned, but robust. My computer roots go back to 1967. I don't trust 'em.
I agree with you...to a degree. Read my post at #39-you simply cannot have paper-based downtimes. We even went to the point of trying to develop “downtime kits” to be used if the entire network went down, as happened to that unfortunate hospital I mentioned.
We had tackle boxes with inexpensive routers and big coils of network cable so we could send images from a CT scanner to some offline storage thing that could be seen by a workstation where images could be displayed in the event we had a downtime like that, but to no avail. It was unworkable.
A good analogy is the Apollo mission to the moon. How much money were they willing to spend to have more than one or even two backup systems to cover certain types of failure. There were both weight and cost considerations, and when Apollo 13 happened, it turned out they needed one additional backup system they could not have designed in, and famously, had to improvise to survive.
Hospitals generally do not have the financial overhead to be able to create a backup “downtime network”. They do things like trying to design failover systems and such, but every single one is problematic to press into service in the event of a large failure.
We generally had a downtime process for each system, such as how to dictate reports when the speech recognition system is down, another one for when the order system was down, and so on. And those can work at nights when system load is low.
But once you have more than one failure, the complexity of multiple system downtimes rapidly metastasizes in complexity and nearly immediately becomes unworkable due to the interconnectivity intricacy.
But, we tried, using always-on SQL databases, load balancers, primary and secondary failover systems, but as of my retirement we could not make them work effectively.
But I know exactly what you mean. As of this writing, I am on the verge of becoming a Luddite. And I despise this trend of filling cars and washing machines with computers.
Bah. Who needs all that crap?