The calm of a relaxing weekend lingers as you sip your morning coffee in anticipation of a full, yet uneventful Monday. Unfortunately, this tranquility evaporates when you receive a text from your office manager.
“The system won’t come up. It’s down.”
What’s the impact on your patients and staff when data needs to be re-entered? How frustrated would patients and staff be if x-rays needed to be retaken, allergies relisted, or medical history recaptured? Beyond the inconveniences, what is the impact to your bottom line?
How well are you prepared to recover from data loss?
The severity of data loss is such that HIPAA requires practices to include disaster recovery procedures in their business continuity plans. According to HIPAA legislation, “A covered entity must conduct an accurate and thorough assessment of the potential risks and vulnerabilities…assess the relative criticality of specific applications and data…establish procedures to enable continuation of critical business processes for protection of the security of electronic protected health information while operating in emergency mode [and] to restore any loss of data.” Click here to read more about this legislation.
NextGen Healthcare encourages dental practices to regularly schedule thorough data backups to meet this standard of health information protection. When you check your backups and test the restoring of data, your practice can minimize the threat of costly and detrimental data loss.
A client’s experience highlights a typical scenario
As a result of not adequately transferring critical knowledge during personnel changes, data backups were not performed for weeks on a client’s image server. The client contacted NextGen Healthcare’s Technical Consulting Services team in a panic that the image server had just crashed. Upon determining that the server was no longer viable, a new one was provided.
Unfortunately, when the client was asked to provide the most recent data backup for the new server, they had no information to report. Despite this setback, NextGen Healthcare experts managed to limit the client’s data loss through a combination of technical expertise and tenacity.
The takeaway of this story—check to make sure you back up all systems containing vital data.
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