Why Online Remote Backups?

Today's servers and computer hardware running your EMR and PM program are designed to provide years of trouble free service.  However, on occasion, hardware fails.  Accidents happen.  Unforeseen disasters occur.  Backups in general are designed to provide you the ability to quickly recover from these events.

However, backups, and especially offsite copies of your EMR (Electronic Medical Records) files have to be religiously maintained.  Most offices start out by carrying backup media offsite on a daily basis.  While this is a good practice, the reality is that people do tend to forget at times to swap out the drive or carry the backup offsite.

There are two problems that arise here.  If there is a data related disaster, and you find out that either the media you have been storing on is corrupted, or if the designated person forgets to carry out the backup, or if the backup media is stolen, you have trouble on several fronts.

First, you could be in a situation where you are unable to recover from a data loss.  This is a serious setback to any business, and it is particularly critical in a physician's practice as the EMR data relates to patient care, and the PM data relates to your practice finances.

Second, you could be in failure to comply with HIPAA requirements if there are no offsite copies of your EMR data.  While there are no HIPAA police running around to enforce this, this could be an exacerbating factor in other situations such as any lawsuits etc.

Third, you could inadvertently be in violation of privacy laws if the offsite backup you carry is misplaced or stolen.

Why risk your practice on these events?  On site and local backups are an essential part of any good backup and recovery strategy.  However, online remote backups offer a safe and consistent way of maintaining a HIPAA compliant offsite copy of your data.  Before your data leaves your server, it will be encrypted (exceeds HIPAA standards) and compressed prior to transmission to our data vault.  This data can not be accessed by anyone other than you as no one (not even us) will have the encryption password that you set.

While it is not prudent to rely on only one method of backup (local or online remote backups), doing both as a redundancy measure will provide you multiple sources of recovery.  We strongly recommend that you add our convenient and cost effective online remote backups to your practice to cover any eventuality and to facilitate your compliance with HIPAA offsite data storage rules.

Naveen V

DoctorsPartner EMR & PM

www.emr-electronicmedicalrecords.com