It is hard to believe that it is September. School is back in session. Stores are decorating for fall. And as a native Floridian, we know it is the height of hurricane season. This makes September the perfect time to review your policy and process for responding to a disaster.
Every practice is required under HIPAA to have a “Disaster Plan” and a “Business Continuity Plan” to respond to an event that may disrupt normal business activities. This could be a natural disaster such as a hurricane, tornado, earthquake etc or it could be a cyber-attack. Sadly, many practices do not have a plan to handle and more importantly recover from a disaster.
A fun way to review or to create a plan is conduct a “table top” exercise which can also be a great team building activity as well. At a team meeting have the “disaster” that you want to create the plan for. A tabletop exercise is a simulated, discussion about a disaster scenario where team members evaluate and discuss their roles, responsibilities, and decision-making processes. It can be an excellent tool for testing your disaster plan or for creating a plan with the ultimate goal of improving preparedness.
For example: Consider all the potential points that a fire could happen in the practice, with or without patients. How would you evacuate? Where is the meeting place? Who takes the lead? In my experience, team members will initially give some off the wall comments, but when pressed, most team will begin to seriously consider what action they would take in the event of what ever disaster is being discussed.
A successful plan to respond to a natural disaster means that team members are trained on the plan and when they are part of the process are more apt to take the right steps. Another important factor to your plan is to include your MSP/IT in your plan. A practice should include your MSP/IT in the conversation when creating the plan. Are cloud back ups in multiple regions? How quickly could the data be restored in the event the workstations and server are not accessible? How would the data be restored? All important questions to consider and should be documented in your plan.
The hope is that you will not need to use your disaster plan, but having a plan will greatly minimize the adverse effects that a natural disaster could have on the practice.
For those that are along the coast, here are some steps to prepare for a hurricane
Confirm that you have a full system back up with your MSP/IT
Consider asking MSP/IT to create a Virtual Machine in the event that the office is offline for a period of time to allow access to patient data.
Lift all workstations and devices off the floor
Cover all workstations, server and other devices with plastic (garbage bags)
Cover conebeam/pan head with plastic
Unplug all devices. During storms power becomes unstable and may cause damage to your devices.
Have a current inventory. If you do not have a current inventory list. Walk through every room, cabinets and closet and take pictures showing what is there. If there is damage the pictures will help with insurance.
Consider printing out your schedule for the week or so (ten days) next week with patient contact numbers. Please remember that you still must protect this information even in the printed format.
Make sure that you have current contact information on all employees and perhaps an alternate contact (who are they riding the storm out with)
If you are unplugging when you leave your office, you may not get a good back up of today’s transactions So print out your schedule for the last day you worked Also print out all daily reports for the last day worked so if you have to you can reconstruct the last day. Better to lose the one or two days than everything. Make sure that all this information is secured from the storm as well as any unauthorized people. (locked briefcase, safe, etc.)
And above all, stay safe.