Electronic health (e-health) is an important part of modern medical practice. Due to the ever-increasing support of electronic processes and communications in the medical industry, data security in this segment should also receive corresponding attention. With the introduction of policies by the medical departments of many governments to support the development of electronic medical records, it shows that electronic medical care will be the future development direction of the medical industry.

According to the App Association, the world of healthcare connectivity technology will see dramatic changes over the next four years, with increasing demands for chronic disease management, personal health and remote patient monitoring. By 2020, 86% of clinicians will agree that mobile apps are critical to patients, a market share of $117 billion.

The report also said that connected technologies will dramatically reshape the healthcare industry, citing emerging initiatives aimed at cost management in healthcare as a key innovation driver. As technology changes, availability will become a key factor, just as human beings cannot survive without blood, and business cannot without data access and availability – this is the foundation of enterprise-level business continuity.

For today’s healthcare industry, data is the lifeblood of all healthcare organizations. Without access to accurate data, patient care can be delayed. IT system failures in the medical industry are a huge hidden danger, both for business and for patients. A recent survey by the Economic Cycle Research Institute (ECRI InsTItue) revealed that nearly 400,000 patient safety-related incidents were caused by compromised data integrity in healthcare information technology systems.

The new e-health system aims to improve the quality of care, improve work efficiency and consistency, and reduce clinical errors, especially in medication administration. However, all of these are based on business resilience to obtain unified and accurate data. Modern healthcare organizations rely on IT systems for business continuity and availability. Unplanned downtime creates huge problems. Unsustainable business due to barriers to data access will incur huge costs for healthcare organizations.

Since 2014, the average number of outages per year has increased (from 13 per year to 15 per year in 2015), as has the length of each outage (mission-critical applications were down from less than one and a half times per year) hours to nearly two hours). The data comes from the 2015 Veeam Availability Report, which surveyed 1,140 senior IT decision makers (ITDMs) or chief information officers (CIOs) in 24 countries.

The findings show that the cost of downtime can be as high as $16 million for the organization under investigation.

In addition to the huge cost to the business of application downtime, the impact goes far beyond the financial numbers. It can be confusing and disorienting for healthcare organizations (68% of companies say it loses confidence) and brands (62% of companies in the survey say healthcare organizations suffer from application downtime and data loss). Worse yet, people’s lives are at risk.