A mega computer system is being installed to safeguard hospital records from being wiped out in the event of an unforeseen disaster such as a hurricane strike or total power failure hitting Bermuda.

In much the same way that many home computers are able to recover data even after their power supply has been interrupted, the new state-of-the-art disaster recovery system for Bermuda?s hospitals will do the same thing but on a much grander scale.

When the new system is installed and switched on in 2006 it will secure six trillion bytes of medical and financial records.

The cost of the so-called ?mirror-image? computer system is a closely guarded secret, but the Bermuda Hospitals Board has no doubt that it will prove of immeasurable value to the safe running of both King Edward VII Memorial Hospital and the Mid-Atlantic Wellness Institute.

At the moment a computer shutdown would result in the hospitals reverting to written records and manually looking up data.

With the new recovery system it would be possible to continue to gain access to all computerised results from a self-supporting back-up computer.

?We need access to critical data in the event of an emergency that impacts the physical site of the computer system,? said Joan Dillas-Wright, chief executive officer of the Bermuda Hospitals Board.

?Our recent accreditation exercise underscored the need for disaster recovery technology that would allow access to data at critical times.?

Danny Dunlop, of Bermuda Computer Services who are the local agents for the system provider IBM, said: ?Having a sound disaster recovery system is particularly important in light of increased risk due to natural disasters and emerging healthcare standards for secure electronic medical records.?

The up-graded live system will be located at KEMH with a mirror-image system at a secure off-site location.

Delia Basden, acting chief information officer at KEMH, said: ?There will be a continuous feed between the computers. This is a system that many companies use and overseas hospitals.

?It is something that we have identified as a requirement for some years but have not been able to pursue it until now because of the computer hardware. But the cost has been coming down over the past five years.?