Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Plans: 4 Things Your LTC Pharmacy Needs to Know
As the FrameworkLTC® suite of products is evolving into an enterprise-level clinical platform, it continues to offer end-to-end support for the majority of long-term care (LTC) pharmacy workflows.
While the scale of LTC pharmacy operations is growing, so is the eco-system of integrated solutions. This growth is part of the collective north star that drives enhancements to the scalability and performance of FrameworkLTC, ensuring our customers can seamlessly interface, interconnect, and collaborate within and across the long-term care landscape and greater healthcare domain.
As the number of patients served by LTC pharmacies increases, the enhanced FrameworkLTC platform offers a clear pathway towards scalability and improved performance. This growth in performance and scalability is predicated on appropriately provisioned IT hardware and infrastructure, including business continuity and disaster recovery best practices.
In order to achieve the best performance from the FrameworkLTC suite of products, SoftWriters recommends that LTC pharmacy customers consider following aspects very carefully.
1. FrameworkLTC Technical Considerations
Generally speaking, the FrameworkLTC suite of products can be installed in several different IT hardware configurations depending on customer’s preference and resources.
LTC pharmacy customers can refer to the following document, “Recommended Infrastructure & Hardware Specifications Guide,” available on SoftWriters Customer Engagement Zone, as a best practice. These recommendations can help ensure that performance expectations are met while attempting to control the IT investments necessary to efficiently operate FrameworkLTC.
It’s important to note that the amount of data you have, along with the number of users on FrameworkLTC, greatly impacts the design topology of your IT infrastructure and servers.
The choices made during IT infrastructure and server selection can have a direct impact on overall system performance. It’s recommended that you consult with appropriate IT professionals to assist with sizing of hardware and equipment selection to set your pharmacy up for success.
Additionally, here are some important considerations for business Continuity and Disaster Recovery procedures to mitigate unexpected interruptions to LTC pharmacy operations:
2. Server Redundancy
The projected growth rate at a given pharmacy should be considered when determining overall requirements for redundant hardware. Common areas of concern are the disk sub-system, server power supply, and memory.
3. Disaster Recovery
An appropriate Disaster Recovery (DR) solution is absolutely critical in order to ensure you have business continuity.
To start, an in-depth understanding of the SQL Server data backup and recovery process is essential to properly design a disaster recovery solution. Some form of persistent storage (NAS is most common) must be included for the entire network.
Careful planning and consideration should be taken to design a disaster recovery solution that provides for multiple levels of data recovery in the event of a disaster. Failure to design and implement a proper disaster recovery solution could result in pharmacy disruptions and data loss.
It is worth considering the option to have data backups created and saved on an appropriate off-site location that is separate from the normal production infrastructure. For instance, one of the public, private, or hybrid cloud infrastructures could be a potential candidate for such off site backup location.
It is strongly recommended that your disaster recovery procedure be tested on at least a quarterly basis. This process should involve restoring the data captured during the backup process to a system (not the production system) where the results can be verified and evaluated.
Be sure that your disaster recovery implementation includes a comprehensive test plan that it is verified successfully. Any shortcomings or additional improvement areas should be covered in your DR plan in future and tested accordingly.
4. Backup Power
It’s strongly recommended to have a battery or alternate power backup with proper surge protection or some other form of backup power for all servers on the network in the event your pharmacy faces a disruption in power.
Conclusion
It’s important to build the right technical foundation to appropriately support a scalable and performant enterprise-grade system like FrameworkLTC suite of products. Given the increasing dependency on information technology to run a successful long-term care pharmacy, it’s more critical than ever to proactively build, test, and validate a business continuity plan and disaster recovery effort for unforeseen events.