Offsite Radiology Backup – Be Prepared for Anything
When a healthcare professional needs access to medical imaging, it better be there. In fact, 81 percent of those surveyed in an Infosys study last year said they were using or planning to use a mission-critical app to achieve their availability goals. Obviously, the cloud weighs heavily into disaster recovery and business continuity plans. Offsite radiology backup is part of that plan.
While nobody can absolutely promise 100 percent uptime, a reliable cloud-based vendor should be able to provide 99.9 percent uptime. Does this mean you can put a halt to all of your internal disaster recovery plans? Some might say the answer is no, mostly because disaster recovery protocols are part of what makes your high availability strategy work. For instance, what if your solution for high availability has errors in it? Your data would be useless, which is why you need a disaster recovery plan to fall back on.
While outsourcing the management of critical applications is the norm today, it goes without saying that you also need to know what will happen should you experience a power outage or other incident that would make your day-to-day activities out of the norm. For this reason, you need to have all your employees and your vendor(s) on the same page with you. Do you have an alternative facility from which to work should your main facility be rendered unusable? Everyone should know where this place is and how you will transfer data as an offsite radiology backup.
Does your third party provider know about your current environment and all the systems you’re using in conjunction with their solution? This is also critical. Communication between you and your provider of medical image solutions should be frequent and clear.
You should have a clear understanding of what your disaster recovery and business continuity plans entail. First off, know the difference between the two: business continuity is about planning for keeping all aspects of your daily functions flowing smoothly despite obstacles, whereas disaster recovery is a tighter focus on IT systems that support business functions.
Not only are these two aspects of medical imaging vital to serving your patients, it’s also required by law. HIPAA regulations call for measures that assure availability of data. What have you done to ensure your data is available?
Thanks to vendors like OffSite Image Management Inc., healthcare providers have a low-cost, yet highly functional method to bring their business continuity and disaster recovery where they need to be. Using multiple Level IV data centers, OffSite can assure clients that their duplicated data will be available to them at a moment’s notice, regardless of what emergency might befall one geographical region or another. Contact us today and we’ll discuss how we’ll tackle your specific needs, including offsite radiology backup.