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This year's hurricanes have exposed the health care industry's nationwide problem of inadequately protected medical records.
When Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, it wiped out many medical histories by flooding or destroying doctors' offices and hospitals reliant on paper records. A University of North Carolina study counted about 6,000 doctors displaced by Katrina. With the overwhelming majority of doctors using paper records, tens of thousands of evacuated patients don't have access to their medical records - if they still exist.
If a similar storm struck South Florida, local physicians would be similarly vulnerable, said Dr. Bernd Wollschlaeger of Aventura Family Health Center. He's a member of the Florida Medical Association's Emergency Disaster Preparedness Task Force.
According to a Rand Corp. study published in September in Health Affairs, 15 percent to 20 percent of U.S. physician offices and 20 percent to 25 percent of hospitals have adopted some version of an electronic medical record (EMR) system, which is considered the best way to preserve and distribute medical records when properly backed up.
Doctors who lose their paper records because their office building blew away or flooded with sewage are in much worse shape than anyone with any kind of electronic record never mind a backup. In fact all those lost paper records (or records that can be read by anyone picking up a chart floating in sewage or blowing around) are violating HIPAA. With Medscribbler if they found the Hard drive 100% recovery would be possible.
The doctors who lost buildings and paper records in NO have a total loss with zero hope of recovery. Doctors with an EMR, any EMR, who left it all behind have a reasonable chance of recovery simply by finding the computer. A data recovery company could save the data and if it was not completely intact a programmer could rebuild the system (well we at Medscribbler could anyway). This would take time, 2 or 3 weeks.
I don't see how complicated a backup plan needs to be, with Medscribbler forget backing up with disk images or the complete hard drive and system. Backup the data only. Re-install Medscribbler on any 2000 or XP computer, how about a laptop, (25 minutes) and restore from the backup (5 minutes). Use a network hard drive, DVDs, a removeable Hard drive another network location, a tape, a backup service even some of the new USB plugs will store years worth of Medscribbler data. It might be a problem to find a compatible tape drive. I thought all EMR backup and recoveries were this simple?
People losing data in todays technoloy situation is usually because they do no backup. If a doc or IT person insists on having a backup on their desk everyday or a sign off sheet that it has been done, catastrophic loss probablity is about 0.
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