Focused Disaster Recovery for Health Care

For any business, ensuring that your information is secure is vital. For the health care industry, the risk of disaster is doubly important because it is not only the life of your business that is at stake, your patients wellbeing as well.  In order to provide a layer of protection from possible data breaches, health care facilities must properly prepare for potential critical system failures in disaster situations.

The Focus
Along with the resident care and employee safety issues, disaster recovery plans should include a focus on two critical concepts: high availability and business continuity. High availability is the concept of being able to access business critical applications at any time. Business continuity relates to the notion that when disaster does strike, your business will need to respond and continue operation. Focusing on these two concepts will help a health care facility rebound quickly from disasters and get back to work with little interruption in productivity.

The Plan
Disaster recovery plans for health care facilities should not be a one-size-fits-all solution; they need to be configured to the specific needs of a facility in order to work successfully. The plan should be a comprehensive step-by-step guide that takes a facility from the point of disaster, through the recovery, to being back up and running.

When putting together an IT disaster recovery plan, the following questions should be considered (and solved) for a strategy to be effective.

• How is my data backed up?
• Where is my data back-up located? Is it a secure location?
• How quickly can I get my systems online after a critical failure?
• How will my employees access the information in case of a disaster?

No one wants to be left sitting on the roof when the floodwater rises. Make sure that your company takes the time to plan how they will handle disaster and prevent the worst-case scenarios from happening. If you are concerned with how to customize a plan to meet the specific IT needs of your health care facility, consult the experts at Prime Care Technologies. With specialized tools, we can ensure that if the worst happens, your company’s data will be protected and accessible.