Downtime and Disaster Planning Guide

This document is intended to help you design a plan for disaster recovery.

Safety First!

No one wants to think about a disaster occurring, but at ALIS we believe it is better to plan and be safe rather than sorry! In that spirit, we provide these guidelines and recommended best practices. We hope that you and your staff can sleep soundly knowing that you are covered and supported in the event of unforeseen circumstances. 

“Disasters” can encompass many situations and levels of severity. The first and most important step you can take is to have a plan, communicate that plan to your staff, and identify the individuals responsible for each portion of that plan.

Because ALIS is a cloud-based solution, a disaster plan should cover what will happen at your community if the internet is down or unavailable. There may also be situations in which your WiFi is down but you still have access to your cellular network (such as 5G or 4G).

Planning and Preparation

1. MODULES Identify which ALIS modules are being used at your community.
2. CHAMPIONS Identify a “Champion” for each module and for each Product Type at your community (one for Memory Care, one for AL, etc.).
3. INFORMATION Identify what information you need to have in case of two types of emergencies:
   1. Temporary internet outage or ALIS downtime
   2. Evacuation of Residents or extended internet unavailability
4. BACK UP Identify back-up processes and procedures to take place at a regular interval to collect that information.
5. CALENDAR Create recurring calendar items to remind the Champions to perform their back-up duties.
6. REVIEW Create a quarterly recurring calendar item to review back up process and confirm that everyone knows how to quickly take the proper steps.
7. TECHNOLOGY Remember that ALIS is very light and can be used on normal cell phones even without Wi-Fi to do your med pass in the event of an emergency. Keeping an internet “puck” or portable Wi-Fi device on hand is also recommended if you anticipate an emergency or have spotty Wi-Fi. 

Downtime response:

Is it the internet or ALIS?

If you have an IT company, start by calling your IT company for help.

If you do not have an IT company, you can check your internet connection at the bottom right of your screen.

You should be able to view your internet connectivity to confirm your connection (this looks like the Wi-Fi signal):

RESULT 1: INTERNET IS DOWN: If you are not connected to the internet or see anything red you should reach out to your in-house technical contact, third party technical vendor, or your most electronic-savvy nurse. You can also call us and we can help you troubleshoot, but this is a problem unrelated to ALIS. Another way to test if your internet is down to pull up ALIS on your phone. If you can access ALIS on your phone, it is likely that the community’s internet or Wi-Fi is down.

RESULT 2: INTERNET IS OK: If your internet appears to be working and ALIS is not, call ALIS right away at 888-404-ALIS (2547) or email support at support@medtelligent.com. Most likely we have been notified by our notification service of any outage, but we always want to hear about your situation ASAP.

Planned ALIS downtime is generally related to updates, hot patches, or new releases and almost always is for less than 30 minutes. You will receive notices to plan for this downtime. Unless it is an emergency, these updates happen in the middle of the night.  

In a short-term downtime situation, you can chart any PRN or routine medications on paper and then put them into the system when ALIS is up and running. For the care charting you can use printed care plans. 

Action Item: Access your back up documents for meds and care plans and your Facesheets.

In the event of ALIS or internet downtime, it is most important to plan for Medication Administration and Care Tracking.

Medications

The best option is to use Citrix ShareFile on a computer at your building so that updated MAR documents are automatically saved in a folder every three days. For more information, check out our article about Offline File Download.

Another option is regularly to Print Community MAR Sheets and Print Current Physician Orders. Use the option “Print to a PDF” so save the files to an administrator’s computer. We recommend just saving over the same file each time to save disk space. Set a calendar reminder to do this once a week and verify that the folder where you save them is accessible to anyone who needs it during offline periods.

Care Plans & Care Lists

There are three documents you can print for offline charting. Regularly save these as PDFs to an administrator's computer similar to how you would do Community MARs and Physician Orders documents as explained above.

1. Care Plans. These are the individual residents' care plans that show their emergency contacts and health profile information on the first page, and then a list of all Care Items and their schedules.
   • Access for all residents by going to Care menu > Print Center > Care Plans "Download" > Print
2. Care Lists. These are lists of all Care Items on a Care List within a shift. These will contain the Care Items for all residents who have tasks scheduled within the Care List.
   • Find these by going to Care menu > Print Center > Care Lists > Care Lists by Day "Download" >  Print

Note that some of these files will take a few minutes to load but will pull up all your resident care documents!

For Observations and Incidents, you can chart observations on paper until your internet connection is restored and then those can be uploaded or inputted into ALIS. Keep a blank copy of your incident form in an Emergency Documents folder on an Administrator’s computer.

Facesheets

To generate a file of all resident Facesheets, go to All Residents, and directly above the list of residents you will find a "Print Facesheets" button. Click this to decide if the Facesheets should be sorted in the document by the resident's last name or room number.

Reference Table for Exporting Information from ALIS:

More Details:

Resident Roster Report

* This report can be printed or exported to Excel and be sorted by AMBULATION in the event of an evacuation.

Observations

* Use the filters to display relevant observations for the past month or more, and use the Print button for the optimal view.

Prospects

To pull your prospects data, go to the Reports and print the Prospects Details Report along with the Tasks report.

MOST IMPORTANT THING TO REMEMBER

Your ALIS Team is here for you!!!!!  Whatever, whenever, please contact us to help.  We have experience helping communities navigate disasters so please do not hesitate to use us as a resource.

Phone: 888-404-ALIS (2547)  Email: support@medtelligent.com