In 1996, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) was enacted to help address concerns regarding health care data security and privacy. As part of the administrative safeguards of this act, health care facilities are responsible for backing up their data and having a disaster recovery plan in place for responding to emergencies.
In general, health care facilities are responsible for maintaining the availability, integrity, and confidentiality of their patients’ Protected Health Information (PHI). If a patient arrives in the Emergency Room in the middle of the night, the physician needs to be able to access the patient’s electronic health records quickly so that they can address their needs effectively.
Therefore, data backups are imperative and a disaster recovery plan is essential to ensure that Protected Health Information can be recovered and restored in a reasonable amount of time if an unexpected event occurs. The health care facility’s disaster recovery plan should outline data priority and failure analysis, testing activities, and change control procedures.
With cloud computing, disaster recovery has become very cost-effective. Health care data can be backed up off-site or hosted in a highly-available environment that maintains data integrity in the event of a disaster. Also, redundancy can also be delivered in the cloud server platform to provide failover protection.
Atlantic.Net offers HIPAA Compliant Hosting and is a trusted partner to medical and health care facilities throughout the country. Atlantic.Net has been recognized by disaster recovery hosting professionals and has been chosen by the Disaster Recovery Journal as their official data center!
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