Are you Prepared?
Have you thought about business continuity and disaster recovery? If you have, have you done anything about it? As a medical practice, you owe it to yourself, your staff and your patients to protect ePHI, and plan for any issues that could cause you not to see patients.
Each day of business brings with it unforeseen risk. Whether it’s catastrophic weather conditions, cyber- security threats, or the vulnerabilities of the technology we’re dependent on to perform daily work functions, there must be both a business continuity (BC) and disaster recovery (DR) plan in place. There must also be complete confidence in the effectiveness of the BC/ DR strategies that are implemented. The truth of the matter is most small, medium and even large practices arent doing nearly enough when it comes to continuity and disaster planning. Its inconceivable that in this era, where practices store more ePHI and sensitive data than ever before, yet the risk of losing this data is so great, that many medical practices still have no business continuity or disaster recovery in place.
It’s not too late to get your business continuity and disaster recovery in place. If it’s cost you are concerned about, just think of how much downtime costs you. You will have workers who cannot work, patients you cannot see, claims you cannot send, etc. Not only that, as a patient, my confidence could be questioned when my physician cannot see me because they have “computer” issues. As you know, word of mouth could hurt your reputation more than anything.
3 steps to planning business continuity and disaster recovery
1. Recognize the need and importance
2. Do an impact analysis and risk assessment\
3. Do some planning to simplify your network
With these 3 steps, you will be on your way to safely security your network, and implement easy procedures to create stability and avoid downtime. After all…who wants to be responsible for a disruption?