Please read this article about EHR interoperability and write a couple paragraphs in your own words regarding the mitigation recommendations about EHR system technical infrastructure. Please do not copy paste another answer. Thank you!

Network Bandwidth -- Unless you have a single site, the odds are you are relying upon metropolitan or wide-area networking to connect at least some of the users to the EHR. An EHR will greatly increase the amount of bandwidth utilized, especially if picture archiving and communication system (PACS) access is being centralized through the EHR.

Recommended mitigation: Work with your EHR vendor to model the needed network bandwidth and then double it to account for growth as well as margin for error.

Network Equipment Redundancy - No matter how much is spent to purchase the the highest quality equipment, how old the equipment is, or how great the warranty is, equipment will invariably fail at one point or another. The challenge for IT is to ensure that the end user retains access to the EHR despite the even rare occurrence of an equipment failure.

Recommended mitigation: Ensure redundancy which obviates single points of network failure between any individual user and the EHR application. As a best practice, we recommend meshing the network access for each department across multiple network switches. We also recommend surplus "hot" routers.

Application Redundancy -- In the paper world, redundancy was easy. The paper chart existed in Medical Records and a backup probably existed on microfiche. Hybrid environments typically utilize tape backups for redundancy of data. In the fully electronic world, the concept of application redundancy is not so simple. Here's a simple guarantee, it's a matter of "when" not "if" the EHR experiences a problem causing the system to be unavailable.

Recommended mitigation: Implement multiple levels of system redundancy. We utilize and highly recommend 5 layers of redundancy including the following:

Cluster all production environments allowing for one cluster to be "down" without affecting the other cluster.

Mirror all data real time to a second "hot" data center running a duplicate instance of the production environment for the sole purpose of disaster recovery. We recommend a "Return to Operation" target of 2 hours for a complete data center outage.

Complete data backups to a disk library. We recommend 7 days of backup on disk.

Complete data backups to tape and store the tape offsite. We recommend 6 months of backup on disk.

Finally, implement a distributed "read only" copy of the medical record. Every 4 hours, we download all patient medical record information in a .PDF file to a server at each location. In a worst case scenario downtime, processes exist to print and distribute the data to clinicians so as to maintain appropriate care of the patients.

Our departing recommendation is to not underestimate the required technical infrastructure. In preparation for an EHR implementation, analyze every aspect of the technical infrastructure and create a mitigation plan for ensuring a stable and highly redundant environment. As we remind our team constantly, the burden of proof as to whether you're technical infrastructure is ready for an EHR is if you can answer in the affirmative to the question, "would you feel comfortable having your Mother, Father, Brother, or Sister treated in this organization?"

Please read this article about EHR interoperability and write a couple paragraphs in your own words regarding the mitigation recommendations about EHR system technical infrastructure. Please do not copy paste another answer. Thank you!