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1. What is a continuity plan, and why is it important? 2. What occurs in your...

1. What is a continuity plan, and why is it important?

2. What occurs in your current place of employment in a disaster? Has your facility discussed the plan for continuity of care and data?

3. If you were in charge, how would you implement a continuity plan? Include lessons from the Joplin Tornado and Mercy Hospital.

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Answer #1

In the healthcare world, delivering the best patient care is an around-the-clock job, and in order to accomplish this task, it is imperative that hospital and healthcare CIOs, CTOs and technology staff do their best to ensure their businesses are protected against the loss of critical patient data, an interruption in patient care communications, or technology downtime due to an infrastructure failure. These unfortunate events—which can be caused by a security breach, a virus or a natural disaster can happen quickly and unexpectedly. The result can be a massive disruption in the ability to deliver quality patient care. In addition, a disruption to a healthcare organization's infrastructure and mission-critical business applications can also put patient lives at risk and cause loss of revenue, productivity and important patient data.

Having appropriate business continuity plans (BCP) and disaster recovery plans (DRP) in place will ensure that health care organizations can operate and care for patients through different types of interruptions. Whether natural disasters, human errors, or system crashes, catastrophes can be tragic in the health care setting, and having these plans in place is critical.

All healthcare organizations today that are using electronic healthcare data in some form are required under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), passed by the US Congress in 1996, to comply with certain data security and business continuity standards. As a result, business continuity is more vital today than ever before in the healthcare world.

BCP is the logistical plan that ensures the system can recover all or some of the patient care systems. In some cases recovering from a system failure quickly can be a matter of life or death. In addition to patient health, resuming normal operations as quickly as possible minimizes disruption to the business. The basic definition of a BCP is an organization-wide process that can define, test and maintain a plan to recover from any system disruption or failure.

As more organizations make the transition to digital electronic medical records, business continuity in healthcare has become increasingly vital.

When disaster strikes, medical professionals must be able to regain access to critical patient data immediately. If the data is lost, stolen, corrupted or unrecoverable for an extended period of time, the consequences can be costly, both from a medical and a business standpoint.

Emergency preparedness is not a new concept to most hospitals and other medical organizations. But even the best emergency preparedness plans can still fall short of the IT protocols needed to keep highly sensitive data secure in today's digital world.

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