A rogue employee looking for revenge could put your practice out of business with just a few clicks.

Several months back, a small practice that we do IT work for had an employee that they needed to let go.  The doctor met with the staff member and delivered the bad news.  Like most employees when they are fired, this person was upset.  However, unlike most employees who get fired, this person wanted to do some damage on the way out.

After gathering up her things, she went out into the parking lot and got into her car.  With her own laptop which she used for work purposes, she got back into the company database and deleted all of the patient files and then drove away.  She thought she had really shown the Doctor a thing or two about messing with her job security.

Luckily for this Doctor, their practice had a data recovery plan in place.  So as soon as the doctor figured out what had happened, she called us and we restored her backup, which recovered all of the deleted data.

What would happen to you if you lost all of your patient data?

The lesson learned here is that data can disappear from your system in many different ways.  Your hard drive can crash.  An employee can carelessly and accidentally delete things they shouldn’t.  An employee seeking revenge can wipe out all your files.  A fire or flood or other disasters can destroy your system.  A computer virus or malware can encrypt your files and make them useless to you.

The beautiful thing is that in all or any of these cases, if you have a backup system for your valuable data on your hard drive or network, your data can be recovered and restored and you can be back on your feet in minutes.

If you do not have a reliable, secure, automatic and HIPPA compliant backup system, call us today and we can get this done for you.  Or, you can visit www.azcomp.com/backup and you can learn more there, and you can sign up for the system and start backing up your data.

As a healthcare provider, there are a few things that you need to be concerned with about backing up your data.

The first is HIPAA compliance.  There are a few major items to consider with this.

Your backups must be off-site.  Most small practices manually backup their data to a local external hard drive, and the external hard drive stays in the office.  HIPAA requires that your backup be stored off-site (meaning not in your office).

Your backups must be secure.  An external hard drive in your office is not secure.  A thumb drive in your purse, or in the glove box of your car, or on the kitchen counter at home is not secure.

There are many other details of HIPAA that must be met also.  Practices often pay for an online backup that isn’t actually HIPAA compliant.  This might be some of the popular products that you hear Rush Limbaugh promoting or see other advertisements for.  These products do not meet HIPAA requirements.  For example: Organizations storing ePHI (electronic Protected Health Information) in offsite storage locations must follow sections 164.502 and 164.504 of HIPAA, requiring Covered Entities to sign Business Associate Agreements with their Business Associates.  Using a company that understands and meets requirements like this one is critical for you and your practice.

The second thing that you should be concerned with about backing up your data is ease of use and reliability.

Manually backing up your data is not user friendly, takes up time and is also not reliable.  If someone has to set a daily task to run the backup, it will be forgotten some days.  If someone in your office has to remember to do anything, then chances are it will be forgotten more often than you should be comfortable with.

Tape backup systems fail more often than you should be comfortable with.  When you encounter data loss, and you need to restore your data from your backup system, if there is any chance that your data won’t be there, then this should be very concerning.  Tape backups do not perform often enough to be considered reliable at all.

AZCOMP has the right backup product for your practice.

If you want HIPAA compliance, then we have the right product for you.  If you want reliability, then we have the right product for you.  If you want ease of use and an automatic backup solution, then we have the right product for you.  If you want security, automation, HIPAA compliance and reliability, then we have the right product for you.

Don’t take short cuts when it comes to protecting your data.  Call us today and we’ll get you set up.  Or, visit us now at www.azcomp.com/backup and sign up there for our automatic backup system and we’ll waive the normal set up fee of $150.  We will set up the backup for free when you sign up online.