In a byline for HIT Consultant, DataBank COO Joe Minarik makes a direct case that data center resilience is not an IT concern but a patient care strategy. Every EHR, telehealth platform, remote monitoring device, and imaging system in a modern health system runs on data center infrastructure. When that infrastructure fails, the consequences extend from delayed diagnoses to medication systems going offline to clinical staff reverting to error-prone paper workarounds.

Minarik outlines the unique demands healthcare places on data center infrastructure: unusually complex data types, strict HIPAA availability requirements, decades-long retention obligations, and a rapidly expanding footprint of remote workloads from telehealth and home monitoring devices. Few industries face that combination of demands at the same scale.

“For healthcare IT leaders, the availability of data center infrastructure isn’t just an IT metric. It’s a patient care responsibility.”

— Joe Minarik, COO, DataBank

The piece argues that healthcare organizations evaluate data center partners on the factors that directly support clinical continuity: high-availability architecture with redundant power, cooling, and connectivity; geographic footprint that enables both low-latency access and geographically separate failover; and compliance frameworks that reduce the burden on internal IT teams.

Minarik closes with a pointed observation: infrastructure strategy is too often treated as a back-office concern, resourced reactively and disconnected from the clinical priorities it ultimately serves. That disconnect, he argues, is where risk accumulates.

Read the full article at HIT Consultant.