How can an EMR System help me recover from a disaster?

Why should a doctor convert his office to an Electronic Medical Record, or EMR, system? Can’t he just maintain the status quo?

Using Electronic Medical Records (EMR) is a business continuity tool. Let’s suppose you’re running your business on paper charts. You have 20 years of patient data in their charts and very little stored electronically. You may say this works and your practice is successful.

What happens if your office gets struck by a fire, flood or theft? If it’s a fire or flood, you would lose all your patients’ charts. Your patients would come into the office, or wherever you relocate to, and you would have no history on them. You won’t know what symptoms they had when they first visited your office, what you diagnosed or what meds you prescribed. You would look like you were born yesterday. Some of your patients might put up with you and your staff asking introductory questions. Some won’t. They would walk out and find another doctor.

If it’s a theft, you have an even bigger problem. You would have to disclose to your patients that their nonpublic data has been compromised. This is part of federal and California HIPAA laws. This would create quite a panic among your practice. As if running a successful business wasn’t challenging enough these days, you would be without patient data and under legal mandates to tell your patients about the theft. We had a dentist panic because his staff fielded 17 calls in a row from patients canceling their appointments. What would you do if that happened to you?

Whatever the case, you’ve lost your patients’ trust. Someone would eventually ask “what is your business continuity plan”? If you’re running your business on paper charts, you probably don’t have a business continuity plan. You could end up out of business from the loss of data and from patients doubting your competence.

That’s where electronic medical records could have saved you. Your patients’ data will be saved electronically and can be backed up online every night. You can control who will have access to that data in your office and know that it is backed up with military grade encryption.

Let’s go back to something I was discussing a few minutes ago. What do you do if your office is struck by fire, flood or theft?

Well, with a fire or flood, you would know that your data (and your patients’ data) was being backed up daily to an offsite location. You would clean up from the mess or relocate your practice. You would restore your patients’ data from the offsite location and be back in business. You will know what symptoms they had when they first visited your office, you will know what you diagnosed and you will know what meds you prescribed. You will look like a responsible business owner who had a successful business continuity plan.

What if it were a theft? Let’s suppose your computers were never recovered. The patient data would probably still be safe. The thieves would have a hard time setting up the computers, logging in to your systems and viewing patient data. The security and encryption would make their task too difficult and time-consuming. They would probably give up, reformat the hard drives and sell the hardware for whatever they could get. Your patient data probably would never be read by the thieves.

Nobody likes talking about disaster recovery or business continuity, but let’s be real. September 11 happened. Hurricane Katrina happened. Burglaries happen. You have to protect your data. You’re better off with the data in electronic format that you are with shelves full of paper charts. You have to ask yourself…what would you do if your office were struck by a fire, flood or theft?