Tips to Help Hospitals Prepare for the Unexpected
No community is completely immune from emergencies and disasters. While this is true, hospitals and healthcare offices can take steps to ensure you are prepared.
Most business owners understand that unexpected emergencies can occur at any time, and they take on many different forms. This may be in the form of a medical malpractice lawsuit or the death of a hospital surgeon or manager.
Unfortunately, many practices are extremely under- or unprepared for some of these situations, such as data destruction due to a weather issue, being held at gunpoint, or theft. There’s good news. You don’t have to go through an emergency to prepare for it.
Keep reading to learn more about unexpected emergencies that may negatively impact your hospital or healthcare practice and how you can be prepared.
Safeguarding Against Natural Disasters
Natural disasters can take on many forms, from hurricanes to tornadoes, landslides, blizzards, earthquakes, and more. The steps you take ahead of the situation to prepare for it can make a huge difference in if you can recover.
For some facilities, this means investing in an uninterruptible power supply, and for others, it may be to establish a patient portal to help with mass communication.
For example, it is possible to manage patient communications, needs, submit prescriptions, and send information securely with a patient portal. Along with establishing a patient portal, it’s also a good idea to invest in a data backup solution. Make sure all data is backed up, at a minimum daily. For some facilities, constant backup is advised.
Threat Proof Your Practice
Like a natural disaster, cases of theft can occur in any business. However, as a medical industry business, you have a specific reason to be worried about theft. When protected health information theft occurs, it can result in serious and extensive penalties. Unfortunately, cases of PHI are on the rise. According to the HIPAA Security Rule, the penalty is a fine of up to $1.5 million for a practice.
What this means is if someone breaks into your practice and steals patient records or laptops, you have to replace the physical items and deal with the cleanup of this theft. While this is troubling, there are several things you can do to protect yourself from theft.
Take Inventory
You should take note of the serial numbers on all the devices that are owned by the practice. It’s smart to think about reducing the total number of portable devices you have and how many can access PHI. It’s best mecidiyeköy escort for healthcare facilities to avoid using thumb drives altogether. These are too easy to steal.
Improve Your Tracking Technology
You should also consider what type of log report or audit trail you have from your vendors. This will give you a better idea of what is going on. For example, if you have one person who is downloading a lot more data than everyone else, you should know this. ataşehir escort It’s also smart to consider systems that can remote wipe devices and erase information from any location. This is beneficial if a smartphone or tablet is stolen.
Conduct Background Checks
Sometimes, the theft of data, goods, or cash is an “inside job.” Because of this, you need to learn as much as you can about a potential employee. This is going to make a huge difference when it comes to theft. Remember, your practice is liable for any breach. With background checks, you can reduce the likelihood of this happening.
Safeguarding Your Healthcare Practice
As you can see from the information above, eskişehir escort
there are more than a few steps to take to safeguard your healthcare practice. Being informed is the best way to ensure that you get the results desired and safeguard your information and practice for the long term.
