A quick look at some interesting EMR and healthcare IT related tweets I saw this weekend.

This was timely after my recent posts about backup and disaster recovery.

Don’t know how computer (EMR) dependent you are until the office power goes out for 2 hrs. Sheesh! (we’re back on now)….

July 29, 2011 9:40 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@drmikesevilla

Mike Sevilla, MD

Interesting comparison for sure.

Parallels w/paper vs EMR?? Fascinating MT @KentBottles: http://ow.ly/5Rrgi Paper calendar vs. electronic {amusing and revealing article}

July 31, 2011 4:25 am via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@ePatientDave

Dave deBronkart

As a physician advocate, I always love physicians’ perspectives.

A Physician’s View of the Change from Paper to EMR http://zite.to/qBM21P

July 29, 2011 6:34 pm via ZiteReplyRetweetFavorite

@lsaldanamd

Luis Saldana

I’ve been seeing a number of new offsite backup services for EMR software. They are becoming quite sophisticated and are an option that I think many doctors offices should consider. I know that in one doctors office I setup a USB hard drive which they could take home with them in order to have some semblance of an off site backup.

This is far from perfect and even harder to secure the right way. Not something that most doctors offices will want to take on alone. However, the real problem with this type of “off site” backup is that they too often forget to take the backup offsite. They don’t verify that the backup was done. I’m sure there’s more, but you get the picture.

Seems like many of these off site backup services provide a really great service that solves a lot of these problems. Not all of them (like verifying that the backup can be restored), but they are becoming quite sophisticated.

I’m interested to hear other people’s experiences with these type of offsite backup services. What do you like? What do you dislike? What do you wish they’d do?

I have a feeling these type of really useful services won’t be in rich supply on the HIMSS vendor floor, but I’ll be keeping my eyes out for useful and practical services like this at HIMSS. If you’re a vendor of a service like this that will be at HIMSS, let me know so we can meet. Same goes for any ambulatory EMR vendors. I’d love to meet with you at HIMSS too.

Traffic at EMR and HIPAA usually slows down on the weekend and so I try to keep my weekend posts just a little bit lighter than the rest of the week. Often that means I talk about some technical thing since at the end of the day I’m just a techguy.

Don’t worry though, I’m not planning on getting really technical here. There are plenty of technical blogs out there for that discussion.

Instead I just want to highlight what might be the most important thing you set up when implementing an EMR: your EMR backup. However, the problem with backing up your EMR is that it’s not like something you buy on TV where you simply “set it and forget it.” Well, I guess you can, but you do so at great risk.

Do you know how often your EMR backs up?
Where is your EMR backup saved and what happens if that place dies?
Do you know that it indeed did back up your EMR?
Have you ever tried to restore your EMR backup?
Is there space for your EMR backup? Will there be space as your EMR backup grows?

I could keep going for a while, but that should get you started down the path to ensuring that not only your EMR is backing up, but that you’ll be able to restore your EMR if the need ever arises. Any IT person worth their salt knows that a backup is only good if you are able to restore it. Unfortunately, the only way to know if you’ll be able to restore it is to do it.

I’ll save the discussion of disaster recovery for another time. However, becoming familiar with your EMR backup is one of the best investments you can make in your practice. In fact, the future of your practice might just be riding on it.