Business continuity

Business continuity is the bigger picture that disaster recovery sits inside. Disaster recovery asks, “How do we get our systems back?” Business continuity asks, “How do we keep seeing patients, answering phones and getting paid while things are broken?”

A continuity plan covers people and process as well as technology. Who decides to close the office or switch to paper? How do staff reach each other if email is down? Can the front desk still check patients in from a printed schedule? Can phones be forwarded to mobiles? Where do staff work if the building is damaged? Which vendors need a call first?

For small practices and offices, a few pieces of IT do most of the heavy lifting: cloud-based email and files that work from anywhere, managed laptops staff can take home, automatic internet failover so a provider outage doesn’t stop the front desk, phones that can ring on mobile devices, and printed downtime procedures for your core software.

Example: our dental practice case study is a continuity story. Internet outages used to close the front desk; now a cellular backup line takes over automatically and the practice keeps working. Planning for Florida storms? Start with our hurricane preparedness guide and the EHR downtime plan.