Southeast Iowa Regional Medical Center Uses AWS to Improve Recovery Times by 67%

Southeast Iowa Regional Medical Center is committed to providing its largely rural community with the same high-quality healthcare found in larger hospitals. Because reliable IT services are integral to this mission, the hospital decided to upgrade its disaster recovery solution. The hospital set up a secondary site on Amazon Web Services (AWS) using AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery (CloudEndure Disaster Recovery), which minimizes downtime and data loss with fast, reliable recovery of on-premises and cloud-based applications. On AWS, Southeast Iowa Regional Medical Center improved its recovery times by 67 percent and strengthened the reliability of its electronic health records (EHR).

From patient registration software to electronic vital-signs monitors, hospitals depend on the availability of IT systems, particularly EHR applications. Southeast Iowa Regional Medical Center uses an EHR solution that requires at least 50 servers with many interdependencies. The solution provides the hospital with a single electronic record for all patients, so reliable access is critical for delivering quality patient care. 

To prevent downtime, the hospital previously relied on a secondary site in an on-premises data center. However, the hospital found it challenging to meet its requisite recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO). RTO is the maximum amount of time needed to recover from a disaster after notification of business disruption, and RPO is the maximum amount of time that data loss is tolerable.

In cooperation with Healthcare Triangle, the hospital set up and tested AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery on 61 on-premises servers comprising 14 TB of data within just 6 weeks. 

“It was easy to install. The console is very straightforward, and it was able to handle all those terabytes of data, whereas our previous solution didn’t seem to be able to,” says Eric Morehouse, network operations manager at Southeast Iowa Regional Medical Center. “AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery seemed to sync the data to AWS flawlessly.” 

During the implementation, there was no disruption to the EHR application or any hospital services. “Using AWS, we were able to offload the entire solution without anyone outside of our team knowing what was going on,” says Shane Tapper, systems executive of informatics at Southeast Iowa Regional Medical Center. “There was no impact on database times and no impact on internet connectivity.”

Using its new disaster recovery solution, Southeast Iowa Regional Medical Center exceeded its original recovery objectives: it achieved an RTO of 4 hours rather than 12 hours (a 67 percent improvement) and an RPO of 2 hours rather than 4 hours (a 50 percent improvement). 

“In reality, the RPO is near real time,” says Grinstead. “When they did the test, the data in the testing environment was being replicated from the source environment in near real time.” As a result, if an unexpected IT disruption occurs, there will be little to no data loss. Tapper says, “Whereas our prior system was running a backup that was then replicated, the new system is replicating things as they are written.” 

Furthermore, the hospital has benefitted from reliable, nondisruptive testing. It can conduct regular tests to confirm that its disaster recovery plan is effective and fix issues that might arise. The hospital follows the best practice of creating an isolated network within AWS for testing. 

The team also has ongoing visibility into the health of its disaster recovery environment. “I have access to the console, where I can see in near real time where the data is,” says Morehouse. “This is 100 percent different from what we had before.” 

Because ransomware attacks are becoming more widespread, the Southeast Iowa Regional Medical Center team appreciates that it can use AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery to fail over to a version of its source servers from a previous point in time, to before a security event has taken place. “Point-in-time recovery was a nice benefit when we first looked at the product, but it’s starting to become a requirement given how large a target healthcare now is,” says Tapper.

Following its implementation of AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery, the team at Southeast Iowa Regional Medical Center is confident that the hospital will quickly recover from any unexpected IT disruptions. The team’s positive experience has led it to begin evaluating how to use AWS moving forward. “The fact that we have gone through the process of setting up a recovery site on AWS and have seen our data accessible in the cloud eliminates some of the questions and hurdles that we might have had a few years ago,” says Tapper. “The long-term plan is to fully embrace the cloud.”

To learn more, visit aws.amazon.com/disaster-recovery.