Technology: Backing Up to Move Forward
You’ve spent a mint to buy and implement an EMR. But that investment is in jeopardy unless you back up your data.
By Shirley Grace Shortly after 3 a.m. on Sept. 24, 2005, Hurricane Rita’s 20-mile-wide evil eye hit the coastline at the Texas and Louisiana border, killing 120 people, wiping 100,000 homes off the map, and uprooting 1.5 million trees.
“For the first time in my adult life, I experienced fear,” admits James Holly, a family physician and chief executive of Southeast Texas Medical Associates, or SETMA. “I’m accustomed to changing things, fixing things. But with this, there was nothing I could do.”
True, he could do nothing about the storm. Nevertheless, he and his 23-physician practice were prepared to deal with just such a catastrophic event. Only four days after the storm, SETMA reopened its Beaumont, Texas, clinic, and it had the EMR operating later the same week.
Not that there were many takers. Ninety-four percent of the greater Beaumont residents had evacuated. “We were so proud of ourselves because we were open, and I think we saw eight people,” he says, chuckling.
Although the survival of patient records may seem relatively inconsequential to the general public in the aftermath of a fatal storm, doctors know better. Accurate and accessible records are critical to the health of your patients and your practice. It doesn’t take an historic hurricane to wipe out your EMR, either. Virus attacks, power outages, hardware or software failures, and human errors are all powerful enough to bring your practice to its knees. Continued...
