Computer Redundancy: A Matter of Life or Death in Medical Environments

For most people, a power outage constitutes a moderate inconvenience. Cooking dinner or watching TV is out of the question for a few hours, but soon enough life returns to normal with little consequence. For a medical facility, however, a power outage can be quite catastrophic and even life threatening for patients. A sustained loss of power can cause downtime on respiratory devices, medical computers, monitoring devices, and critical equipment for patients in neonatal,  intensive care or cardiac units. Emergency or time critical procedures cannot be performed and loss of refrigeration can severely affect medications and stored blood and tissues. Without any power, medical computers cannot access electronic patient medical records and other hospital data, and orders for medication or procedures cannot be completed. With worsening weather patterns around the world and the prevalence of rolling blackouts, the outlook seems fairly bleak, but this is not the case for well prepared hospitals and care providers. Many facilities now employ a mix of powerful backup generators and equipment with hot-swappable batteries or UPS (uninterruptible power supply) systems for critical devices.

Purpose built medical grade computers can make a huge positive impact on service delivery during a power loss event. Tangent offers several all-in-one medical computers that offer battery backup options for such occasions. The Tangent T24B medical computer was designed with three easy-to-use hot-swappable batteries and battery bays to ensure a 24/7 runtime. This provides up to 10.5 hours of runtime without any interruption of power to the user. The T24B also offers antimicrobial treatment to deter the spread of infection, a 24 inch PCAP ten point multi-touch touchscreen, is shielded to prevent interference with other sensitive medical equipment, and has several options for mounting including cart arms, wall mounts, or a stand.

The Tangent M24T 24″ medical computer has an internal UPS battery backup that offers 30 minutes of uninterrupted power. This allows staff to continue working for a time without having to swap out any batteries. The M24T is a high performance machine that can be equipped with up to 32G of memory. The Tangent C24 24” medical computer also has an internal UPS battery backup that allows for 20 minutes of use without any external power. The C22 works very well on medical carts and arms due to it’s convenient front panel buttons, antimicrobial surface, and PCAP touchscreen. All the medical computers mentioned here are offered in a variety of screen sizes and with a variety of available system upgrades and optional accessories to best suit the needs of the care providers and their patients. Disaster recovery is a major focal point for many medical organizations, but the best prepared hospital systems avoid many potential disasters by using equipment and medical devices that offer internal or external battery backups. Several of Tangent’s medical grade all-in-one computers were designed for the continuity of patient care even in the face of unforeseen losses of power, while also delivering top level performance 24 hours a day.