Medical Servers

Posted in Medical Hardware, Medical Software

When it comes to health care, it is important to understand that digital information was completely out of question less than 100 years ago. The technological explosion that took place during the last few decades has significantly changed the things for the better, though; many doctors now make use of computers and the medicine as we know it greatly benefits from the latest discoveries in the information technology field.

But the computers that are used in the hospitals aren’t (or shouldn’t) be regular computers, which can be bought in a regular computer shop. No matter if we are talking about PCs that are used at the hospital’s reception, computers that are used for administrative tasks or computers that calculate the parameters of the laser that is used for eye surgery, everything must run without any issues, thus preventing any and all of the dangerous situations that could cause problems to the patients.

It is not all about the computers, though. The software that runs on them has to be as error-free as possible. The modern software development methodology teaches the programmers to use fallback techniques, thus making sure that everything is kept under control and no harm is done even if the system errors out.

Then, there’s database connectivity and privacy. The patients’ database must be kept secure; it is best to keep it encrypted, and limit the number of people that know or have access to its password to a minimum.

Often times, a hospital has several branches and a lot of data is exchanged between computers that have a similar role either via a local area network or using the internet. The much better alternative is to use a centralized server and only allow limited access to the clients. As an example, it could be possible to give read-only access to the clients and only make actual database changes on the server. Saving a copy of the database before making any significant changes to it is also recommended.

Since all the records must be kept in-house, the amount of information will be constantly increasing. Not only that, but it is known that many hospital had to face serious issues in the past because their computers were attacked by hackers, or even because their IT personnel was unable to properly take care of the server maintenance.

The conclusion is quite simple: a medical server has to pass with flying colors through much more tests in comparison with a regular computer, and even with a server, because it is a critical mission hardware and software system. Ideally, the server should be kept in a data center facility – www.quotecolo.com lists several providers in each one of the American states and Canada. This way, the hospital will have access to its precious data at all times, because the power requirements, internet requirements, constant temperature, security measures, etc, are all in place.

Critical units have to face all sorts of emergencies, and the patient data has to be input into the system the minute he or she enters the room. Choosing the proper doctor that will treat the patient, prescribing the necessary medicines, deciding on the type of treatment that will be necessary, and even choosing the proper type of food for that particular patient, are just a few of the operations that simply can’t be done without having a centralized server that is able to share data with all the different medical branches of the hospital.