Kent Bottles

Doctor offices are becoming more and more dependent on their computer systems. With electronic medical records and scheduling on computers, down time can bring everything in a doctor's office to a screeching halt.

 Disasters can be due to:

1. Fires

2. Floods

3. Burglaries

4. Computer malfunctions

5. Virus infections

 A Gallup poll of small business owners found that 30% had been shut down for 24 hours or longer in a a three year period and 10% reported problems with civil disorder or arson.

What kind of planning should be done?

1. Make sure back up disks work by testing them periodically.

 2. Firewall protection

3. Antivirus software

4. Off-site data backup service

 5. Read NFPA 1600, a preparedness standard from the National Fire Protection Association (www.NFPA.org)

 6. Consider a spam, virus filtering service that can cost up to $500 a year.

 7. Consider hiring a consultant to help your office develop a plan to cope with such disasters.

 Reference: Eve Tahmincioglu, Trying to stay a step ahead of Murphy's Law. The New York Times, August 11, 2005, C5.

Data Backup (rc10ant, Tue, Aug 16, 2005) Some studies have shown that a large percentage of data backups are not doing the job (up to 50% of them or something like that) so the data is not there to restore when you need it. Problems can range from bad tapes to software glitches to the proper data not being selected for backup. Case in point: I recently performed technology evaluations on two medical practices within a period of one week - neither had gotten a good backup for months. And they were not aware of this problem. The likelihood of an office needing to restore data at some point in time is high - much higher than the likelihood of a fire, flood, earthquake, theft and many other disasters. Point taken re: disaster recovery. An important part of this means making sure you are getting good backups.