How to Make A Disaster Recovery Plan for Healthcare Organizations?

To better manage businesses and provide services, healthcare organizations often use the information systems like HIS, PACS, EMR, LIS, CIS, etc. to simplify the staff's work and improve the patients' experience.

Although information systems bring convenience, they also bring new trouble. Information systems can help healthcare organizations better serve the patients only if the hardware and software can function properly.

Many hospitals must have seen the consequence of server downtime. If the hardware is down, the applications will stop working. This might cause that doctors can't use the electronic health record or the patient's registration process will get stuck. Then there will be complaints all around the hospital.

There are also some acts like HIPAA, Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which clearly how healthcare organizations should protect sensitive data and crucial business continuity so every healthcare organization should know that disaster recovery is important. It will avoid loss of business and penalties from the supervision department.

5 Tips for health organizations to make disaster recovery plan

To make a proper disaster recovery plan, you can follow the steps below,

1. Know the IT infrastructure

IT infrastructure includes the hardware and the software. Before you have a plan for disaster recovery, you should have a list of hardware and software which are used now. There could be some connection between hardwrae and software like certain server is used for running certain software.

It is suggested to list the business systems first and then attach which servers they are running on.

2. Know the potential risk

For IT environment, one of the most common problems is data loss. Sometimes it is caused by software bugs, sometimes users' incorrect deleting, and sometimes the virus.

Except for data loss, users' experience is also very important so you should at least know why the systems get slow or stuck.

To know other potential risks, you should find the terminals and end users of the systems to know their real experience.

3. Meet regulatory compliance

This is very important because you might find everything goes fine but there are tickets sent to you if your organization doesn't meet regulatory compliance.

Therefore, you should know the local regulations for your organization. For example, if you are a healthcare organization in America, you should make your organization HIPAA compliant.

4. Make a disaster recovery plan

A disaster recovery plan mainly includes how to prevent data loss and how to recover business systems.

In the data loss prevention part, you can write how to backup data, how to prevent data from being stolen or damaged by the attacker, how to train the staff to protect data, etc.

The business systems are not the same important, so in the disaster recovery part, you can list all the business systems and then divide them into different groups and make different plans. For example, the level 1 business systems should be backed up every 3 days and recovered in 15 minutes in the event of an emergency and the level 2 business systems should be backed up every way and recovered in 10 minutes.

5. Test the disaster recovery plan

To make sure the disaster recovery plan can work for you in the event of an emergency, you should test the plan in test environment and if possible, monitor the backup system to make sure you always have a chance to recover data. If you would like to perfect your plan, here is a disaster recovery plan checklist.

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Sum Up

IT infrastructure has helped healthcare organizations simplify the staff's work and better serve the patients but disaster recovery is also important to protect business continuity and avoid tickets.

You can follow the tips in this post to make a disaster recovery plan step by step.

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