The Show Must Go On!
When I started this blog series on HIPAA Readiness, I had no idea that real life was going to play such a big role in my posts! After telling, you why HIPAA readiness is such a big deal right now, how to handle possible breaches, and how you, as a pharmacy owner are responsible for your employees’ actions when it comes to HIPAA, a major pipe burst and “rained on our parade.” We didn’t see that coming, but we were sufficiently prepared to march on.
It’s important that your pharmacy is prepared to “march on” and to see patients through whatever happens to your facility or your community. Everything from hurricanes and snowstorms to heat waves can damage your building, take out your electricity, or keep key employees from getting to work, resulting in downtime or worse putting your PHI at great risk. These extraordinary circumstances may make patient data temporarily inaccessible or worse, completely obliterate it, which is unacceptable for any organization or entity that handles patient information. Therefore, it’s important to have a backup and save your electronic PHI in a safe and reliable alternate location. Furthermore, your disaster recovery plan should address the fallout from physical damage, loss of electronic PHI, and from the loss of key employees.
Here are a few high priority items for your plan:
- Save your Electronic PHI – How can you access it if you can’t get into your building? Consider backing up your electronic PHI to a remote, possibly cloud-based, site. Cloud storage technology has advanced to such great heights that it cannot only provide easy and instantaneous access, storage, and retrieval of data at reasonable rates but can also ensure a high level of reliability and security. Make a plan for you or key staff members to access data remotely, so they can work with patients from a safe place. This will also require you to ensure that all of your employees who are remotely access your network are aware of standard security protocols for remote access.
- Anticipate your Patients’ Needs – How can they get the medications they need if your facility is out of commission? You might establish a relationship with another independent pharmacy to back each other up in emergencies. Also, consider your state board requirements when utilizing a temporary site for your pharmacy.
- Have an Alternative Communication System – Make sure you can get in touch with your employees when need be, even during power outages, as rare as they may be, or emergency situations. In case you need to move to another facility or there is any other change in operations, regardless of how temporary it may be, immediately update your website with instructions on how patients can get their prescriptions filled.
- Cross-train Employees – The loss of a key employee to injury or attrition or worse or death cannot shut down operations.It is necessary to provide your patients with uninterrupted access to drugs or other medical products or services, irrespective of the internal challenges your organization may be facing. To this end, you need operational redundancy for the functions your employees perform just as much as for the functions your computers perform.
- Train Staff and Test Plans – So, you’ve made a contingency plan to ensure smooth operations, even in emergencies or other unforeseen circumstances, but does it work? Get everyone on board and try it out. By doing so, you and your staff may detect loopholes that may present obstacles in providing nonstop services and also identify a strategy to resolve the shortcomings. After all, in the digital age, you’re just one step or rather one click away from finding a better, faster, and more reliable and cost-efficient method to save your electronic PHI.Do you see something that needs to be updated or that which may pose a challenge in maintaining your organization’s PHI in a completely reliable, safe, secure, and easily accessible manner, now or in the future? Then take action today to save your electronic PHI and keep it safe so it’s not susceptible to loss or damage from natural disasters or other threats.
For more information about HIPAA and other pharmacy compliance solutions for your pharmacy, call PRS at 1-800-338-3688 and speak with one of our Specialists. Please visit the Blog for additional posts on compliance issues and what you need to know as a pharmacy owner.