HIPAA News

SoftLight Development Offers Solutions for Safe Data Storage During Hurricane Season

(June 19, 2007)-- Man-made and natural disasters affect all businesses at one time or another. With another active hurricane season looming, many businesses may be scrambling to come up with a plan of action. Don Thomas, CEO of SoftLight Development Inc. (SLD), a leading healthcare consulting and software solutions company, offers the following basic principles that even small businesses can apply to ensure their data will be safe in the event of a disaster.

First, companies should create a data recovery strategy. Most companies do not realize how extensively their data drives their business. Thomas recommends enlisting an expert data backup company and ensuring data will be saved in multiple locations. If a business' off-site data backup company is experiencing the same disaster as the business, chances are the backup company has lost the information as well. Geographic location is important.

Next, companies should keep all documents in electronic format. Paper documents can be scanned using a desktop scanner and then backed up. A disaster and crisis plan should be in place, accessible and explained to the employees. Crises and disasters are both difficult for smaller businesses, but they are distinct situations. It is important to have a plan for both types of dilemmas and to help employees identify each type.

Finally, businesses need to create a disaster continuity plan that identifies the basic hardware / software required to continue with the company’s products and/or services after a disaster. This could mean the difference between failure or survival.

SLD has consulted companies for more than 15 years and specializes in creating pay-per-use data management solutions for healthcare organizations. Some of the group’s innovations include:

• Manage My Paper – Integrates medical practice management software into a user-friendly interface for clinical use. It manages appointment, patient and billing information between medical billing organizations and clinics to streamline patient and billing data for the practice management company and dramatically increase ROI for both the clinic and practice management organization.
• Manage My Paper Transcriptional Service – Allows the subscriber to upload patient reports to the servers, maintaining ancillary reporting services, such as cardiovascular reporting, and ancillary organizations. The system automatically “reads” the reports and securely stores them in a HIPAA-compliant system for retrieval by the referring provider. The system contacts the referring providers by e-mail and fax, allowing them to securely retrieve the patient study reports.
• Manage My Studies – Used by cardiologists, radiologists and teleradiologists to manage remote and local radiology images and studies. MMS can be used in the office or on a laptop at any location with an Internet connection. Features include, among others, Secure Remote Access without special hardware, On Call Notification, Reading Schedule Notification, Post Measurements and Cross-platform Compatibility.
• Manage My Paper Referral System – Used by clinics and practitioners to securely and efficiently find, pre-certify, schedule and receive test notification for patients that are referred to ancillary services, such as CT, MRI and Cardiology.
• Manage My Data and Manage My Data One-click – SLD’s newest developments, offering remote access to backed up data from any laptop or Web-enabled device, with complete HIPAA compliance. One-click is a simplified version of the original Professional model.

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