July 8
Today’s healthcare environments, from small clinics to megacity hospitals, are going digital faster than ever before. This means that more and more vital, personal, and confidential health information is being stored in digital format and this once paper-based world of doctors and healthcare professionals is now run on a huge variety of digital databases, patient data, and technology.
Managing this amount of information is a challenge IT professionals in the healthcare sector are now facing, and, as with other digital data in our homes and businesses, issues with security and accessibility arise. Patient data and “eHealth” medical records can move around a lot between specialists, physicians, and other caregivers. While piecing data together in the event some of it gets lost may yield some required data back, what if critical x-rays were stored on a hospital server and hadn’t yet been emailed to the physician? Keeping healthcare operations going in the event of a loss or a disaster is a key priority and in the digital health world, data is essential to every part of those operations.
Another big focus of digital eHealth data and medical information is security. Maintaining confidentiality and privacy of personal medical histories of patients and the records of physicians is an essential requirement for any disaster recovery and data loss recovery project. In the event of a data loss scenario from a hard drive crash or natural disaster choosing a reputable data recovery vendor is a priority for health information teams. CBL has worked on recovery projects for everything from major medical equipment devices to local walk-in clinic databases and disclosure is the foremost part of our process. Safeguarding data privacy is part of the recovery process in our secure laboratory environments. These are priorities the American Health Information Management Association encourages IT professionals to ensure are met.
Natural disasters from floods and severe storms are a more common threat to healthcare environments than one might think. Technology is pervasive in the digital medical world and so everything from power outages to fires can affect operations. We have seen waterlogged laptops from emergency rooms and short-circuited hard drives containing a whole region’s patient information arrive in our shipping/receiving departments. Remember CBL Data Recovery should be part of healthcare disaster planning – as a last resort. As we always say, it’s not a matter of if, but when data disaster is going to strike. No where more can I think of where being prepared and keeping operations running is as critical than in the healthcare field.
Category: data recovery, data loss prevention
Tags: data recovery, digital health records, e-health, ehealth, healthcare, healthcare data management, healthcare data recovery, healthcare it, hospital data recovery, it professionals, medical data, medicalrecord recovery, medical records
Jul 12, 05:31 AM
Thanks for sharing!
Jul 20, 12:33 PM
good insight into digital healthcare record keeping & eHealth data standards from Steve Lohr at the NY Times http://j.mp/rolifH