Question

You work in a facility that was affected by a recent flood . You were more fortunate than most because only your basement was flooded. The problem is that your data center was in the basement . The data on the computers has been completely lost because the computers were destroyed. Unfortunately,the back-up tapes were located in the room next to the data center and were also destroyed. Fortunately, the HIM department is on the second floor and the charts are intact. Although your lab, radiology, dictated reports, and nursing notes were electronic, the reports has been printed out and filed in the medical record. The HIM director has been trying for a year to get the information sytem department to develop a contingency plan becuase she wants to stop filing the reports that are stored electronically. The IS staff has not recognized the need for the contingency plan, but the flood was catalyst that convinced them.

1.What recommedation do you have to ensure that your facility will not lose everything if another flood hits the area? Include both contingency and business continuity plans in you. recommendations.

2. The failure to implement contingency and business continuity plan could result in what types of problems?

Answer 1

1. The given case talks about contingency, business continuity plans, and DR (Disaster Recovery) management. In the given case, a recent flood has destroyed the data center along with backup tapes. In this case, there were a few activities that the hospital could have done better. First and foremost was ensuring the DR system was implemented properly. Every DR system has a backup at either the vendor`s location or stored on a cloud server. Most of the recent data management solutions are cloud-based. This would mean, irrespective of the data center damage, data would still be secure over the cloud or at the vendor`s base. After any damage, the hospital only needed systems to retrieve the information from cloud servers. The analysis of this case shows that the IT team did not do a complete study of the solution being proposed and tried to implement an easier solution. If the cloud-based based model had been implemented, the data would still be secure. I would recommend creating such a DR system to ensure all the data is stored properly. Managing physical records is not a viable option in the long-term. As a contingency model, I would move the data center from the basement to a higher section so that the infrastructure is not damaged easily. Converting all the relevant information into a digitized manner is also important. Any other incident could have destroyed the physical records too leading to loss of all collected information. For a business continuity plan, I would recommend implementing the cloud-based solution. After any disaster which could lead to damage to the data center, the hospital will have to purchase a few computers and operations can restart fast since data is already available over the internet. All vendors will engage in confidentially agreement so a breach of data will be liable to legal issues. Also, all such vendors would have very high security for its solution, so it will not be lost in the cloud servers either.
2. The gaps in implementation show there is a lack of coordination between the teams involved at the hospital. The given case shows the negligence of proper planning at both vendors as well as the hospital end. If contingency and business continuity plans are not implemented it can lead to the following issues:
   • Loss of valuable data and confidential information
   • Damage to reputation
   • Loss of trust from patients
   • Re-collecting all the lost information
   • Re-building knowledge base in the hospital
   • The additional cost to set up new HIM systems
   • Additional effort to plan and implement new solutions

All these problems can be easily avoided if hospitals have a proper contingency and business continuity plan in place.