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Company was hosting cardiac patient monitoring on EC2

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Re: Company was hosting cardiac patient monitoring on EC2

#71

Post by mamp »

stick wrote: post #67

This is a combination of posters not understanding what the technology is used for and the tech guy exaggerating the urgency of the situation. Remote cardiac monitoring isn't for people who are imminently going to die of catastrophic heart attacks or who risk dropping into a fatal arrhythmia (wonky heart rhythm). In fact, there isn't even solid evidence that it saves lives. What it is used for is investigating patien…

From the website I think this analysis is correct. Holters store the 24 hour data on the machine as well. The 12 leads are not continuous but set pieces which also store locally. If they were providing real-time monitoring with alerts then this would be more serious. This seems to be a backup system, ironically itself without backups.

Re: Company was hosting cardiac patient monitoring on EC2

#72

Post by bluesnowmonkey »

gte910h wrote: post #13

I see EC2 as a good piece of infrastructre to have as part of a failover plan. But should it be even 1/3 the providers for servers? No.

Triply redundant hosting providers is really setting the bar high. Lot of 20/20 hindsight being put into play the last few days!

In my experience, small companies typically have one hosting provider, off-site backups, and the probable but untested ability to bring up a fresh installation in a few hours. That's both common in the real world and good enough for most situations. It would get you through an outage like this.

Re: Company was hosting cardiac patient monitoring on EC2

#73

Post by jmm »

recampbell wrote: post #28

Interesting quote from a company providing such services: "The Remote Health Monitoring System is the IT backbone that supports HealthFrontier’s entire portfolio of solutions, including the ecg@home™ and the microtel™/ecgAnywhere™. It captures data transmitted by the patient through USB, Bluetooth, or trans-telephonically. The RHMS™ then stores the information in a database, which can be accessed by the patient’s doc…

My uncle owns a few elder care franchises and had me look into monitoring services as a funemployment project. So I've spent a bit more time with this than I'd like to admit...

The company I was most impressed with was http://www.halomonitoring.com . The device seems to be designed well and the monitoring services (online portal for caregivers or family members) are impressive, comparatively.

There's kind of a sea change happening with home health monitoring -- from the "I've fallen and can't get up" devices to more robust and interactive solutions. GE recently bought a company that provides institutional monitoring equipment and services.

Lemme know if you want the full report :)

Re: Company was hosting cardiac patient monitoring on EC2

#74

Post by becomevocal »

agotterer wrote: post #61
sliverstorm wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know, that gets me thinking- wouldn't it be pretty damn slick if Amazon offered a way to plug your own hardware into the greater EC2 cluster remotely, so that if Big EC2 goes down, you still have copies of your machines running locally? Maybe you could even timeshare your machines out for some other instances for a discount on your service, similar to how you can send solar power back up the power grid for an ele…

Not exactly what your talking about... But I believe RackSpace has an offer for mixed cloud and physical machines...

Yes, they do (Cloud Connect), but they have to be in the same data center. I've just gone through some sales / tech meetings with a Rackspace rep about the setups and while Cloud Connect is definitely cool, it is not well documented at this point and I couldn't get all the info I needed. I'm sure we'll all hear more about it throughout the year.

Re: Company was hosting cardiac patient monitoring on EC2

#75

Post by JasonMoyMN »

chrisjsmith wrote: post #9

Epic fail for the company which is hosting on their kit. Whoever threw it on there is a total dick. There is nothing wrong with EC2 here. It's just not the right tool for the job. If they are monitoring cardiac patients, they should, at least for non-critical people, have the instrumentation cache the data and send when available over leased lines. If it is critical, it should be PROPER HARDWARE attached to the POTS…

Nonsense. EC2 is 100% liable in this case and Amazon should be sued out if existence if any of these patients had died.

Re: Company was hosting cardiac patient monitoring on EC2

#76

Post by prodigal_erik »

kapitalx wrote: post #20
chrisjsmith wrote: post #9

Epic fail for the company which is hosting on their kit. Whoever threw it on there is a total dick. There is nothing wrong with EC2 here. It's just not the right tool for the job. If they are monitoring cardiac patients, they should, at least for non-critical people, have the instrumentation cache the data and send when available over leased lines. If it is critical, it should be PROPER HARDWARE attached to the POTS…

I wonder if they have the device connected through wifi to the patient's internet connection. I'm sure EC2 is not their only possible point of failure.

Yeah, I don't know how much I care that Amazon isn't delivering three nines when the local cable monopoly at dad's place is lucky to reach three eights.

Re: Company was hosting cardiac patient monitoring on EC2

#77

Post by yaix »

Just wow! How difficult can it be to have a backup dedi server with the DB mirrored running at some other provider to quickly switch to, just in case? Even many simple web sites have a config like that. Clouds have been around for decades, they are still new and may fail.

Re: Company was hosting cardiac patient monitoring on EC2

#78

Post by lawnchair_larry »

st0p wrote: post #52
lawnchair_larry wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Who else would you suggest for providing this type of service? Given the information we had a week ago, I can see how Amazon may have looked like the best solution for HA. Their site never goes down, after all.

Well, first of all if they had used more geographical regions (I don't know what the official amazon buzzword), they shouldn't have real bad problems. I don't know about you, but I believe mission critical systems should be hosted in at least 2 physically different data centers. When it's life critical, this should be a no brainer. Second of all, according to Amazon PR speak this failure should not be possible. Every…

1) Amazon's outages took down multiple "availability zones"

2) Amazon is HIPAA certified, which means they adhere to the industry standard for storing private medical data. In this sense, they are as good as any other company that such data is being passed around.

Re: Company was hosting cardiac patient monitoring on EC2

#79

Post by gte910h »

bluesnowmonkey wrote: post #72
gte910h wrote: post #13

I see EC2 as a good piece of infrastructre to have as part of a failover plan. But should it be even 1/3 the providers for servers? No.

Triply redundant hosting providers is really setting the bar high. Lot of 20/20 hindsight being put into play the last few days! In my experience, small companies typically have one hosting provider, off-site backups, and the probable but untested ability to bring up a fresh installation in a few hours. That's both common in the real world and good enough for most situations. It would get you through an outage like t…

It's a medical device. It's not a imposition in that case.

Re: Company was hosting cardiac patient monitoring on EC2

#80

Post by st0p »

lawnchair_larry wrote: post #78
st0p wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, first of all if they had used more geographical regions (I don't know what the official amazon buzzword), they shouldn't have real bad problems. I don't know about you, but I believe mission critical systems should be hosted in at least 2 physically different data centers. When it's life critical, this should be a no brainer. Second of all, according to Amazon PR speak this failure should not be possible. Every…

1) Amazon's outages took down multiple "availability zones" 2) Amazon is HIPAA certified, which means they adhere to the industry standard for storing private medical data. In this sense, they are as good as any other company that such data is being passed around.

Yeah, but availability zones are not geographical zones. Amazons outages were only in one datacenter.

Didn't know what HIPAA meant, but apparently they are certified for storing medical stuff.

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