Client Story
Enabling the continuity of patient care: A closer look into business continuity at East Kent
Extending the partnership
As East Kent prepared for the go-live of its electronic prescribing and medication administration system (ePMA), their team extended their
partnership with Altera by implementing the Altera Business Continuity Solution, recognising the potential impact of any IT downtime on the trust.
This solution is now providing the trust’s healthcare teams with read-only access to critical patient data during any scheduled or unscheduled downtime of the Sunrise EPR system.
Continued informed patient care during any system downtime
Clinical data support in the event of downtime
Read-only access for administrative roles, and other roles such as nurses and clinicians
Secure access to patient data and comprehensive audit capabilities
Secure access to patient data
This view-only access to patient data during downtime includes patient lists,
orders, results, clinical documentation, eMAR, IVBP, LVP label printing and user access log reporting. It enables the trust to manage risk and maintain the highest quality of patient care by providing continued informed patient care during any system downtime. Additionally, it provides secure access to patient data and comprehensive audit capabilities.
Jon McKinlay, Head of IT Applications from the trust expressed their
satisfaction with the Business Continuity Solution, stating, “We are very impressed with the speed and responsiveness, both the system itself and
Altera team who implemented it. Being fully web-based it’s amazingly fast
and provides us assurance in a business continuity situation as it runs on
infrastructure separate from our core Sunrise system. There is real excitement
here about the BCS [Business Continuity Solution] and what future benefits it
could bring.”
Continuity of patient care
The Business Continuity Solution enables operations to continue during any
downtime by using recently synced patient data and harnessing localised
access to information. By utilising replication technologies, Sunrise EPR
regularly updates a subset of patient data directly into the Business Continuity Solution, ensuring that timely data is available in the event of a planned or unplanned downtime.
The continuity of healthcare services
This is giving East Kent anytime access to patient information, providing
around-the-clock read-only access to Sunrise patient data to support better
clinician usability and administrative workflow and enabling operations to go
ahead, reducing the need for cancellations of patient appointments and care
should any disruptions happen. Additionally, a detailed activity log houses
records of all users to ease the potential pain of auditing processes.
Overall, the implementation of the Altera Business Continuity Solution has
helped East Kent ensure the continuity of its healthcare services, providing
healthcare teams with reassurance and the necessary tools to provide highquality patient care even during system downtime. The trust can continue to deliver exceptional care to their patients, regardless of any unforeseen circumstances that may arise.
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