On May 22nd at 5:41pm local time, an EF5 tornado – with 200 mph winds, six miles long, one mile wide – hit the town of Joplin, Missouri, with St. John’s Regional Medical Center in its path.

There were many heroes that day and in the aftermath. What mitigated the disaster’s impact and aided the recovery was the $800 million decade-long initiative of building an IT infrastructure and implementing an electronic health record (EHR), along with solid leadership, at Mercy Health, an integrated health system that included St. John’s.

In their Views from the Top session, “Mercy Rising in Joplin: How Advanced Planning and Resolve Are Helping Us Rebuild,” Lynn Britton, president and CEO, and William Showalter, vice president and CIO, both of Mercy Health, shared their experiences of recovering essential information and services, reestablishing information and workflow and rebuild.

After the tornado hit, 183 patients and 17 staff were evacuated within 90 minutes. Mercy Health established unity of command and communications, said Showalter. They were able to get their IT infrastructure rebuilt quickly because they had the foundational pieces in place: standardization of the infrastructure footprint and applications, process consistency, elimination of failure points, virtualization, consolidation of data processing capability, and discipline.

The mobile hospital was up in a week, and within seven days all systems were operational and open for service to the community. Modular hospitals were assembled over six weeks, and four hospitals in nine months. “We had delivered all key services and fulfilled our promise to the community,” Showalter said.

“Healthcare is dependent on information, which is solely reliant on technology,” said Britton. Out of the tragedy, Mercy Health has imagined a better future. The new Mercy Hospital Joplin will be a state-of-the-art hospital, which will include much of the innovation that Mercy Health has achieved in the last 10 years, he said.

The true story, Britton said, is not the disaster or the event itself, but in bringing up a new campus, a new model of care, and using technology such as virtualization and telehealth in new ways to develop the best patient care and experience.