Backing up multiple times per day provides data security and ‘peace of mind’. If your E.H.R. system needs to be maintained on a server within your office there is additional cost in time and money that practice needs to incur.
What if there is a power failure? Corruption of the database? Fire? How does your practice/system manage these scenarios to insure that at most the practice only loses a few hours of data? If the E.H.R. system your practice has in their office is client server then the practice needs to develop and execute a data back-up and recovery service. If your E.H.R. system is based on ‘cloud computing’ and maintained by the vendor, I recommend you ask some questions of the vendor. These questions include:
- How many back-ups does the system make per day?
- Does the main production server back-up to a redundant server?
- Does the system contain a data vault for daily back-ups of all production and redundant servers?
- Does the company have personnel with degrees in computer science and systems engineering?
If you receive some long pauses and non-direct answers on the questions above, ask to speak with a person from the company with a Computer Science or Systems Engineering experience. If they do not have any personnel with Computer Science or Systems Engineering degrees/experience, there might be further questions that you should ask to insure optimal data back-up and recovery.
