Planning, Testing Lead to Successful HIT Backup and Disaster Recovery

In a recent blog post, ONC officials emphasized the importance of planning when it comes to HIT backup and disaster recovery. “Unfortunately, the reality that an organization’s health IT systems will become unavailable or compromised is a matter of when, not if,” explained blog post authors Andrew Gettinger, M.D., and Justin Cross, M.D. “In some cases this may be due to natural disasters that extend the loss of electrical power, or massive flooding that takes essential servers offline.  In other cases the downtime may be due to a bad actor such as a malicious attack. Sometimes it’s simply a hardware failure that causes a chain reaction of failures. Regardless of the reason, the needs of patient care must continue.” The increasing dependence patients and clinicians have on digital tools makes data backup and the fast recovery of health systems critical to patient safety and the ability of clinicians to treat patients effectively. Backing up data and achieving fast recovery times also impacts hospitals as businesses.