It’s Monday morning.  You get into work a little late, the kids were arguing about who wanted which lunch.  Your fingers are crossed that it’s going to be a good day.  You open the door, and… the EHR server is down.  Complete chaos and bedlam, right?  Wrong.  You have VitalCenter™, Galen Healthcare’s EHR Business Continuity Solution.

VitalCenter™ is a client-server application that delivers a PDF of the patient chart to a local machine to provide physicians and nurses with the medical information they need to provide optimal care to their patients.  Patients with scheduled appointments will have their charts downloaded throughout the day for quick access.  In the event of a walk-in or urgent care patient, a user can also search for a patient chart “On Demand” and within seconds, the records will be available.

Not only does this become a lifesaver (sanity saver) for those responsible for the clinical applications in a medical practice during a network outage or application failure, it also allows for planned downtimes (for upgrades or hotfixes) to be less stressful for clinical and IT staff alike.  We have all seen news reports about system failures and the havoc they cause as clinical staff, physicians, and most importantly, patients are negatively affected due to the inaccessibility of patient records.  In one situation a nurse stated that “All information such as medication administration records and patient histories were outdated by two to three days.”  VitalCenter™ provides up to date patient information in an easy to read and accessible format.  For a different organization experiencing an outage, they planned to document visits on paper, and then re-input the information later when the EHR came back online.  A facility using VitalCenter™ can create patient notes from within VitalCenter™ during the downtime. In addition to the patient records being available, documentation of appointment encounters during downtime are automatically uploaded to the EHR without the need to scan in pieces of paper or duplicate documentation efforts.

Prior to becoming a Clinical Consultant for Galen Healthcare Solutions, I was a client.  I used Galen for both technical and professional services.  My COO and I decided that VitalCenter™ was the solution we needed to ensure that downtime would not be disaster time. Speaking from the perspective of someone who had to be on call 24/7/365, VitalCenter™ helped me sleep better at night.  Regardless of whatever reason the EHR was down, VitalCenter™ would allow us to not only see our patients but still provide the best medical care possible.

To learn more about VitalCenter™ check out our website http://www.galenhealthcare.com/products-services/products/vitalcenter/