Capital Region Medical Center

Implements the Summit Downtime Reporting System to Ensure Business Continuity

The Challenge:

Capital Region Medical Center is a 100-bed, community based, teaching hospital that provides a full menu of services including surgical, obstetrics, pediatrics and rehab. Capital Region, located in Jefferson City, Missouri, has over 2,500 users utilizing the MEDITECH healthcare information system.

Capital Region’s recent move to an electronic medical record meant that the organization no longer had paper backups of critical information needed by care providers for the delivery of patient care. The organization needed to find a centralized location to store critical pieces of information that was easy and secure for care providers to access.

The Solution:

With the knowledge that it needed to provide its staff with a secure snapshot of key information from its MEDITECH system to ensure business continuity in the event of scheduled or unscheduled downtime, Capital Regional implemented Summit Downtime Reporting System.

The organization runs 12 different reports at different intervals for various departments such as nursing, dietary and IT. It generates a future orders log every 3 hours, current diet orders every 4 hours, scheduled appointments log once per day, nursing kardex every 4 hours, electronic medication administration logs every 12 hours, ER log once per day and admit/discharge registers and census reports every 4 hours.

There is at least one downtime machine located at each nurses’ station within the hospital that is plugged into emergency power which allow staff to access downtime reports in the event of unplanned downtime or a power outage. Capital Region also has machines in the Emergency Department, Admissions, Dietary, and House Supervisors office that can access downtime reports, which are centralized on a network drive.

Since implementing Summit Downtime Reporting System, Capital Regional has had 4 unplanned downtimes, one of those being 8 hours long. The medical center also has a 2-hour monthly planned downtime to refresh server hardware. In all of these instances, patient care staff has found the Summit Healthcare DRS system to be a very useful and dependable tool to obtain the necessary information they needed to care for patients and make decisions. As Capital Region gears up for its MEDITECH 5.6 update this fall, the organization is anticipating 8 hours of downtime in which it will have to rely on the downtime reporting system to deliver the critical information to patient care staff during that transition.

Engagement Highlights:

• Organization has 12 different reports running at different intervals for various departments.

• Capital Regional uses Summit Downtime Reporting System to ensure business continuity in several departments such as nursing, dietary and IT.

• Since implementation, Capital Regional staff has depended on the Summit DRS technology through 4 unplanned downtimes and routine planned monthly downtimes.

• Capital Regional will rely on the downtime reporting system to deliver the critical information to patient care staff during their MEDITECH 5.6 platform upgrade.