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I’ve been following with interest the blog dialogue about data backups. Having spent more than a quarter century in the information technology industry and the health care technology business, I’d like to offer our perspective on this very critical issue.

John, you’re right.  A very large number of doctors in the market for EMRs today are still considering client server systems, and they should be very concerned about finding a viable backup method. However, the data backups that you’re talking about —  which may be nice for some files such as Excel files or family photos — do not come close to offering the level of protection necessary for mission critical health care applications like electronic health records.

Backing up a live database containing patients and clinical information in a secure (consider HIPAA) manner and with a high degree of confidence on a regular basis is considerably more complex. We’re talking about a complete paradigm shift in the way that doctors think about data backups, which, if not yet recognized, will soon envelop the health care industry as more and more doctors begin to use EMRs. Do you seriously think banks use some of the services you mentioned to back up financial data?

Software as a Service (SaaS) vendors, like Nuesoft, are not just in the business of providing process automation to the healthcare industry in the form of Electronic Medical Records. HIPAA compliant redundancy in the form of live a backup is at the core of this technology offering. We provide central delivery of fault tolerance, load balancing, and other critical aspects of managing a network. It’s much more than trivial passive backups. We guarantee up-time and continuous secure access to clients’ data in real time.

You alluded to the trust factor. If trust is at the core of this discussion, it’s hard to imagine that most doctors would trust a staff member, let alone themselves, to sufficiently manage their backup processes (not to mention provide for the security and on demand access of their data). You can look to numerous recent examples in the news media of security breaches or other unfortunate and unnecessary mishaps that occurred when well-intentioned medical practices took on the back up responsibility. If an annoying little article in the local paper is not enough to deter doctors from handling their own IT tasks, perhaps the HITECH amendments to HIPAA will. The steep new civil and criminal penalties – including fines of up to $1.5 million, and public reporting requirements would be enough to put a practice out of business. That’s why we definitely advise you or anyone else against backing up this sensitive data on a USB stick.

Thank you for engaging us in this discussion. We’ve enjoyed it so much that you got us thinking more about the need to extend the conversation to health care professionals, and so we are planning to write an article about the many complexities of IT management for small medical practices in the modern era. Of course, you can bet that we’ll let you know when it is available!

–Massoud Alibakhsh, President and CEO