Offsite Backup Services for an EMR

I’ve been seeing a number of new offsite backup services for EMR software. They are becoming quite sophisticated and are an option that I think many doctors offices should consider. I know that in one doctors office I setup a USB hard drive which they could take home with them in order to have some semblance of an off site backup.

This is far from perfect and even harder to secure the right way. Not something that most doctors offices will want to take on alone. However, the real problem with this type of “off site” backup is that they too often forget to take the backup offsite. They don’t verify that the backup was done. I’m sure there’s more, but you get the picture.

Seems like many of these off site backup services provide a really great service that solves a lot of these problems. Not all of them (like verifying that the backup can be restored), but they are becoming quite sophisticated.

I’m interested to hear other people’s experiences with these type of offsite backup services. What do you like? What do you dislike? What do you wish they’d do?

I have a feeling these type of really useful services won’t be in rich supply on the HIMSS vendor floor, but I’ll be keeping my eyes out for useful and practical services like this at HIMSS. If you’re a vendor of a service like this that will be at HIMSS, let me know so we can meet. Same goes for any ambulatory EMR vendors. I’d love to meet with you at HIMSS too.