Hurricane sandy hit the New Jersey shore on October 29, 2012, destroying coastal areas in New Jersey and New York. I remember the city streets, tunnels and buildings submerged, including the halls of the building where I was recently hired to be my first editorial character. For many New Jersey people, the sight of hurricanes Harvey and hurricane ilma's flooding in Texas and Florida reminded people of hurricane sandy. The devastation of hurricane maria is encouraging - the storm is so powerful that it is hard to imagine life in Puerto Rico.
At the local level, healthcare providers in all of these affected areas will have to assess damage and retrieve what they can from the floodwaters. Let’s hope for their sake—and the sake of their patients—that patient records are not among the losses. For dental equipment practices with valuable patient data, it could be potentially devastating if they didn’t have a proper backup strategy.
Fortunately, wired magazine reported that more and more doctors have been using electronic medical records since the devastation of hurricane katrina in 2005. When hurricane katrina happened, it is estimated that only about a quarter of American doctors use electronic medical records (EMRs), and at the time of Sandy (Sandy), the country's nearly half of all health care system adopted EMRs. Now, under hurricane season damage, it is estimated that about three-quarters of the suppliers have EMRs.
While it is important to have the EMRs, it is important that your data is stored on an external hard disk in your office and in a protected non-site location, such as in the cloud. It is also important to remember that in times of crisis, the true value of any backup strategy is able to recover data when needed to business continued - not just the data stored in the device or cloud. This is why your data supports your trusted partners to help you recover quickly.
Consider TechCentral's hybrid backup service
Water damage is only an event and in many cases may result in loss of patient data. Human error, theft, fire or cybercrime, including ransomware, is just a few of them. The risks are real, and the importance of data backup and rapid recovery is not emphasized enough.
Don't be fooled into thinking that all cloud (or local) backup and recovery solutions are equal. Henry Schein TechCentral's hybrid backup service is specifically designed for the dental supplies market, providing multiple recovery points in the above scenario. This is a single solution that takes a coordinated approach to managing backup copies of critical data by using aes-256 bit encryption, while the data is stored locally and in the cloud. In addition, the TechCentral team will monitor your daily backups and assist you in performing the required files and data recovery.
