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Before disaster strikes...
It's not a question of if, but when. The bigger and longer your career gets, and the more dependent upon technology we become it's only a matter of time before some very important component of your system fails.
Could be something is simple as a power outage, or something potentially much more devastating such as the willful act of a former employee.
Whenever the case, unless all your data is safe and secure, you run the risk of taking a potentially devastating blow.
About one week ago, we suffered in our practice a catastrophic server failure. Fortunately, we did not lose any data files due to redundant systems and backups. Nevertheless, it has been a major project to rebuild the system, and get us back up and running. Fortunately, due to the work of great professionals both hardware and software, we are almost back to 100 percent.
As good as our back up and data preservation systems were, we're taking steps now to make them even better.
Here are some very simple tips that will allow you to preserve data integrity.
Make sure you take a hard and external back up off site, every day.
Number two; make sure both your hardware and software support teams will be there for you, when disaster strikes. You also want to make sure that your servers are running mirrored drives, and that their integrity is checked on a regular basis.
Also, make sure your staff office policy and compliance plan has technology (internet) violatation penalties clearly spelled out.
Finally, make sure that your in office systems such as data entry and patient management systems are simultaneous and on paper, so when the time comes for data updating and reentry, the job is made infinitely easier.
A couple of very simple paper systems here kept us fully operational, and able to collect payments, and code patient data for electronic entry.
We will have much more on this, as the complexity of data systems, as well as their service potential to you continues to escalate with each passing week.
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