Disaster Recovery is a difficult but necessary element of any successful health care provider. Though disasters are unpleasant to consider, they are an unfortunate reality of the Internet Age. Think of technological disasters as the inevitable downside to the substantial benefits of managing your business online.

Home Care provides industry-specific features for home health and hospice agencies.  HIPAA, enacted by Congress in 1996, established standards for the security and privacy of healthcare-related data. This legislation charged healthcare professionals and organizations with taking measures to ensure that their electronic data systems were fully compliant with HIPAA regulations. Those regulations explicitly state that any health care provider, clearinghouse or health care facility that electronically maintains or transmits health information for individuals must establish procedures for backup & recovery.

Additionally, healthcare providers are required to maintain rigorous standards for data integrity, access and audit controls for Protected Health Information (PHI). State laws also provide strict operating regulations for medical practices that affect data management. Archived medical records need to be obtainable for between five and 10 years in most states.

The disaster recovery plan begins with modifying management practices to mitigate the effects of disaster, then documenting all elements of a distributed computing environment, including policies, procedures, infrastructure technology, and applications. The plan will address the requirements for a recovery location and a recovery environment and steps to take to set up the recovery environment and implement the applications. Finally, the plan will also include steps to return to the original location after reconstruction.

Contact us today for a no-cost, no-obligation analysis of your system and more information on Data Smart Online Backup for home health care agencies.