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Best Practices for Electronic Health Records and Virtualization
By Edward Cone on 2009-06-05


The Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center/Beth Israel Deaconess Physician Organization EHR project team provides some lessons learned from its big virtualization project.

See also: the project in depth.
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1. Understand the end-users' needs.
How will the EHR transform the physician practices' processes, and how will you deliver EHR? How will virtualization help you realize this goal?

2. Ensure high availability.
Once the practice migrates to EHR, patient care is dependent on the EHR availability. Virtualization and high availability will help drive SLA's.

3. Make security a priority.
Medical centers are regulated to ensure patient confidentiality, and must earn the trust afforded by their patients, as stewards of confidential medical information.

4. Clearly define data ownership.
Knowing this at the start is critical to understanding how virtualization can be used and to what benefit.

5. Leverage all the features of virtualization.
Understanding the full potential of the tools up front will help drive down costs while improving flexibility and rapid change response.

6. Know your disaster recovery and business continuity plan.
Determine how virtualization can be leveraged to attain some of your DR/BC goals.

7. Be flexible.
Bring in expertise from outside if needed. You only get one shot to build it right; rely on the experts to help you achieve goals.

8. Be sure of your partners have relevant experience.
Migrating clinical information has unique clinical and business challenges. It's an absolute must to partner with people who have worked in this sector.

9. Design with future flexibility in mind.
Ambulatory EHR systems are quickly evolving. Ensure that the design of your virtual environment can take full advantage of the flexibility provided via virtualization.

10. Remember that virtualization is not a panacea.
Virtualization provides many benefits but does not take the place of good practices for designing enterprise health-care systems and networks.

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