Facilities in Oklahoma, Texas and Arkansas know the list of threats well: tornadoes, severe thunderstorms, ice storms, flooding, extended power outages and, increasingly, cyberattacks. Any of them can take your computers, phones and internet offline, often at the moment you most need them.
Long-term care facilities that participate in Medicare and Medicaid are already required to maintain an emergency preparedness program under CMS requirements. IT recovery is a natural part of that plan, and it supports HIPAA's contingency plan requirements as well.
Not every system is equally critical. Build a simple list of your systems and rank each by how quickly it must be restored. Consider:
Electronic medication administration and charting.
Resident census, orders and care plans.
Nurse call and emergency communication.
Phones and internet access.
Email and staff scheduling.
Billing, payroll and admissions.
Door access and cameras.
For each, note the recovery time you can tolerate and how much data loss is acceptable. These decisions drive technology and budget choices.
Many systems depend on others you may not think about. Your EMR might be cloud-based, but without internet access, staff cannot reach it. Your phones may be internet-based. Your door access may need a server. Draw a simple map of what depends on power, network, internet and vendors.
These two failures cause more outages than most people expect.
Power. Confirm which outlets are on generator power and whether network equipment, servers and nurse station computers are connected to them. Use battery backup units to bridge the gap between a power loss and generator start, and to allow orderly shutdown.
Internet. A single connection is a single point of failure. Consider a secondary connection from a different provider or using a different technology such as cellular backup, and test the failover.
Cellular and mobile hotspots. Keep a few charged devices available for emergency communication and limited access to cloud systems.
The best technical recovery plan still needs a care plan for the interim. Prepare:
Printed medication administration records and current care plans, updated on a schedule you define.
Printed census, emergency contacts and physician lists.
Paper forms for admissions, incident reports and orders.
Instructions for entering information after systems return.
A clear way to tell staff on each shift when downtime procedures begin and end.
Store copies where they can be reached without the network, and update them regularly. A drawer of out-of-date printouts can be worse than none.
Backups must be recent, separate from your main network and tested. Document the restore steps, who performs them and how long they take. Keep offline copies of recovery instructions and vendor contacts.
A fire or storm damages equipment. A cyberattack may leave equipment intact but untrusted. Recovery may require rebuilding systems from clean backups, resetting every password and waiting for forensic investigation. Include this scenario in your plan, along with contact information for your insurer, counsel and incident response partner.
Name who declares a disaster and who leads IT recovery.
List the people who must be contacted, with backup contacts and multiple phone numbers.
Decide how you will communicate with staff, families and regulators if email and phones are down.
A plan nobody has practiced is a guess. Once or twice a year:
Hold a tabletop exercise where leaders walk through a scenario.
Test generator and battery backups for critical IT equipment.
Run a restore test.
Record what went wrong and update the plan.
CMS expects emergency preparedness programs to be reviewed and tested regularly, so these exercises serve double duty.
UnityCare IT helps long-term care and healthcare organizations design recovery plans, backup systems and failover connectivity. If your current plan lives in a binder nobody has opened in a year, we can help bring it up to date.
Call or text: 405-285-3845
New customers: start@unitycareit.com
Existing customers: support@unitycareit.com
Address: UnityCare Technologies, 2524 N Broadway Ste 554, PMB 947974, Edmond, Oklahoma 73034-4172