Recommedations

Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital has taken several strides to make the conversion into a modernized Hospital from the days of pen and paper charting and patient information storage. Despite all these improvements there is still much to be done that the Information Services department with the cooperation of hospital management can do for the hospital.

Redundant Backups

One of the most important things that Robert Wood Johnson needs to do is to not rely on their only data center in Mountain Lakes to hold all of their patient information. It has happened in the past that certain data lines had been cut accidentally by power company employees during maintenance that resulted in unprecedented downtime for the hospital. Information silos built up rapidly during the time it took to reconnect all on-site computers back to the main data center in Mountain Lakes. More time and energy was spent to try and resynchronize all data during the downtime. That was just one scenario discounting earthquakes and other natural disasters. This could have been avoided had there been other secure, synchronized data centers elsewhere that could maintain database record integrity in the absence of one data center.

On-site Information Systems Department

Due to all the heavy development and upgrading that the Sunrise Clinical Manager undergoes, it would make more sense for the Information Systems department to have their main offices on-site at the hospital itself. Currently, the Information Systems department is located in an office building two blocks away from Robert Wood Johnson's Hospital campus and that makes it somewhat difficult for their employees to assist the hospital staff with any problems that arise. Along with having the Information Systems department on-site, a data center with all patient information could be kept on-site as well to decrease instances of lag reported by end user at very least and serve as but one of many backup data centers at the worst case scenario.

Hardware Upgrade

Many of the desktop computers in Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital are almost 10 years old. Almost all of them still run Windows XP. An upgrade to Windows 8 is out of the question for Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital, but an upgrade to Windows 7 and new enterprise desktop machines would allow for improved processing speeds and available memory devoted to running Sunrise Clinical Manager.