McKesson offering IT disaster recovery service

To help healthcare organizations maintain their mission-critical capabilities when the unexpected occurs, McKesson has launched a tiered offering of cost-efficient disaster recovery services that can be scaled to fit the needs and budgets of smaller to average-sized hospitals.

A recent study from MeriTalk showed that 73 percent of healthcare IT executives don’t believe their organizations are fully prepared to ensure continuous availability of patient data during unplanned system outages or disasters. Additionally, the average cost for healthcare organizations that have experienced an unplanned outage in the past 12 months was $432,000 per incident.

“Healthcare organizations today are faced with increasingly severe financial pressures and many are running leaner than ever,” Russell Smith, vice president of McKesson Enterprise Information Solutions, said in a release. “How many can afford to risk the patient care disruptions and financial repercussions that could result from an extended system downtime? Based on the conversations we have had with hospital CIOs, we believe that many do not have an adequate way to assess and mitigate the risks involved.”

McKesson's disaster recovery as a service model will support most types of storage arrays, allowing organizations to replicate across multiple vendors and technologies, according to the company.

Based on their needs and priorities, healthcare organizations can choose either McKesson’s Disaster Recovery Services (DRS) Core or DRS Plus levels of service. DRS Core provides geo-redundant replication of an organization’s critical data. If a disaster is declared, costs are incurred according to hourly calculations in a “pay as you go” model. The DRS Plus level includes all of the DRS Core services but also provides options for reserved resources and more detailed terms and commitments related to service level agreement values for recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO).

This scalable solution can help lower the total cost of ownership via economies of scale and delegation of specialized management responsibilities, according to Smith. "This can help reduce the burden on the hospital’s onsite IT staff while offloading the responsibility to McKesson for recovering the infrastructure in the event of a declared disaster.”