Healthcare Business Continuity: Do IT Ailments Threaten Critical Patient Data?

As a healthcare company, your patients are your number one priority. Part of your obligation to them is to keep their health-related information confidential by maintaining secure business continuity practices.

Keeping your patient data properly backed up and protected will help you focus on what matters – your patients.

This information can include their health history and insurance and financial information. Should any of this information become compromised, it can hinder your ability to deliver healthcare services. Healthcare regulations are constantly evolving and, in order to meet new industry standards, more and more healthcare businesses are actively converting medical records into electronic versions. As this trend continues, it’s no surprise that the industry has been hit hard recently by cyber attacks. The companies affected are paying huge sums to recover. Entire systems can fall victim to ransomware, locking healthcare providers out of important patient data. As people’s lives can quite literally depend on a healthcare provider’s ability to access their health information, there isn’t any time to waste.

Time for an IT Assessment? 

While you may be taking some precautions, such as securing and backing up your sensitive data, sometimes that’s not enough. There is a common misconception that data is safe if backed up once a day, but this outdated practice is no longer sufficient for several reasons:

• If you forget to perform the backup or the backup process fails, you’re not protected.
• If you only back up your files once a day, you’re left vulnerable to the loss of an entire day’s work.
• If you don’t properly validate your backup files, you could be in for an unpleasant surprise when you actually try to use those files to restore your company’s operations.
• If you only back up your files on-site, you could lose them too—leaving you with no way to meet client requests.

If you only back up your raw data, rather than all your application and server configuration files, it could take several days to restore your practice — because you will also have to rebuild your servers, operating systems, applications, etc. Ultimately, there’s a lot that can be missed when implementing a backup strategy, so it’s important to get it right the first time around. Keeping your patient data properly backed up and protected will help you focus on what matters- the patients you serve.

Learn about CompuData’s Disaster Recovery Services

In a 2014 study by the Poneman Institute, 91% of healthcare organizations experienced at least one data breach. The industry as a whole has experienced 125% more criminal attacks on their data than in years passed. Of the organizations who were affected, breaches cost roughly $2 million per company. Attacks on the healthcare industry are clearly on the rise, but there are some precautions you can take to safeguard your data- right now.

Protecting Business Continuity

Any company that has not recently re-assessed its backup and disaster recovery procedures should therefore do so in order to conform to these industry-standard best practices. Business continuity describes a complete solution for backup and disaster recovery. A true business continuity solution will protect data on-premises and in the cloud. Whether data is on servers or in SaaS applications, it needs to be backed up. Business continuity goes a step further and offers you the ability to restore your data, which we call disaster recovery.

Ready to enhance your business continuity? Contact CompuData today!