Electronic health record (EHR) systems are so meaningful today that many healthcare organizations cannot provide adequate service if they are unavailable. Information technological solutions can stop working in case of a natural disaster, and a massive flood is a typical example. This event can render some essential servers intolerable or break the electricity supply. Under such conditions, an EHR becomes useless because healthcare professionals cannot access it to insert or retrieve patient information. That is why medical facilities should create a plan to determine what specific procedures their staff members can take to respond to a natural disaster.
Disaster response planning is an essential step for every organization. A risk management approach should be utilized to predict a future crisis and explain how to mitigate it. According to Gettingger and Cross (2018), a facility should ensure that its EHR system regularly develops backup copies. This step is necessary to guarantee that information will not be lost in case of disaster. Furthermore, medical organizations should subject their employees to regular training. Staff members will understand how they should deal with patient data during the disaster (paperwork is a suitable response) and how information should be inserted into the system after the crisis (Gettingger & Cross, 2018). This approach seems an effective way of responding to a natural disaster.
One should add that disaster planning is a complicated task requiring many resources and efforts. Thus, data analytics should be a basis for developing disaster response procedures. This activity analyzes raw data to make reasonable conclusions about some future events (Chapter 1, n.d.). That is why organizations should invest in their data analytics teams to prove that crises can be predicted or, at least, an effective response will be developed.
References
Chapter 1. (n.d.). Introduction to computers and health information management [PDF document].
Gettingger, A., & Cross, J. (2018). Disaster planning your health IT [PDF document].