How Healthcare Providers Protect Your Data: Security, accessibility, and backup.

• Author: Barbour, Tracy
• Position: TELECOM & TECH

Hospitals, clinics, and other healthcare organizations handle massive amounts of sensitive information, making effective data backup critical to their operations. In fact, healthcare industry professionals say data backup is not only the key to safeguarding confidential patient information but it's necessary to their survival.

Healthcare providers and caregivers frequently use what is known as electronic protected health information (EPHI) in their efforts to assist patients. They use this information in nearly every clinical care workflow scenario and clinical care decision. The accessibility of EPHI--which includes everything from lab results and radiology images to patient medications--helps guide patient care. "Ensuring the reliability and availability of this data is critical to our mission and is a top concern in information services," says Don Waters, vice president of engineering services at Providence St. Joseph Health Information Services. "It's delivering the right data at the right time to the right place of care every single day."

Ensuring the accessibility of patient data is also a chief concern according to Mario Lanza, MD. Lanza is president and medical director of Anchorage-based Alyeska Family Medicine, a full-service clinic that provides services ranging from diagnosing and treating acute and chronic illnesses to routine health screenings and lifestyle counseling. Lanza is committed to taking a comprehensive approach to protecting patient information. "Patients rely on us to have their medical records available when they come in for care," Lanza says. "Computers fail and hard drives fail. If we were to lose access to the data, it would be catastrophic."

Lanza is adamant about ensuring Alyeska Family Medicine's data is reliably backed up, and he feels the cost of maintaining proper data backup and security is money well-spent. "The potential cost oflosing all of your data is astronomical," he says. "If we lost our entire database, we would be out of business."

IT security is a top priority for Alyeska Family Medicine--especially given the potential threat of ransomware, hacking, and other similar risks. And Lanza appreciates the triple-redundancy system that DenaliTEK uses to back up Alyeska Family Medicine's data.

DenaliTEK employs a 3-2-1 backup strategy for all of its clients--regardless of their industry. It stores client data in three places: two local devices and one cloud storage location, according to Todd Clark, president of DenaliTEK, which specializes in...