Disaster Recovery Plan: Healthcare and Medical Situations

This report details a disaster recovery plan for healthcare, emphasizing the critical need for such plans in medical situations, particularly after large-scale disasters. It categorizes recovery plans into electronic and paper patient information, outlining parameters for securing each. For electronic data, the report explores cloud backups, flash drives, and dedicated websites as recovery methods. It also addresses the vulnerability of cloud servers and suggests alternative solutions like flash drives for situations where internet access is unavailable. For paper documents, the plan suggests using hospital records, insurance companies, medicine stores, and personal physicians as sources for retrieving patient information. The report highlights the importance of data security and the responsibilities of various stakeholders, including hospitals and insurance companies, in maintaining and protecting patient data for future use and reference. The report also references several sources to support the findings.

Running Head: DISASTER RECOVERY PLAN
Disaster Recovery Plan
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Disaster Recovery Plan
In cases of healthcare and medical situations, recovery plans are always necessary in
cases of large scale disasters that disrupt the lives of thousands of people. For instance, the
Hurricane Katarina devastated a large area of land and islands in North America and as a result,
there was a severe medical situation where most of the affected people also lost their medical
records as a result of the disaster (Sahi, Lai & Li, 2016). This resulted in the delay of their
treatments as they are mainly done after checking the patients’ medical records. Hence, in order
to avoid these situations in the future, suitable disaster recovery plans are necessary. Some of the
possible disaster recovery plans that can be applied are divided into two categories – electronic
and paper patient information. The parameters for securing electronic and paper patient
information are as follows.
Parameter for securing paper information will include the signature or thumb impression
of the patient, a stamp from the hospital authority, security printing of the document for avoiding
tampering, copying or scanning and others.
Parameter for securing electronic information will include electronic stamp or QR code,
electronic record of the patient’s thumb impression or eye retina, system firewalls and others.
The disaster recovery plans for electronic patient information are as follows.
Cloud Back Up – In the current technical age, cloud computing is sufficiently developed
to be relied upon for storing significant amounts of data. Hence, the users who have access to
internet connection can use cloud services to store their personal medical data including medical
records, medications taken and others (Nelson & Staggers, 2016). However, the issue with this

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solution is that cloud servers are vulnerable to external attacks and other security issues and
hence, the personal information and medical records of the users may get stolen by hackers and
other unethical third party users. However, cloud back up is based on subscription and after a
disaster, information from the cloud can easily be retrieved by logging in.
Flash Drives – There may arise a situation that during a massive scale disaster like
hurricane or typhoon, the internet connection in a large area gets lost due to disconnection of
internet cables. In that case, there will be no way for the users to access the internet and retrieve
data from cloud (Sword-Daniels et al., 2016). The solution to this problem is keeping backups of
medical data and records in flash drives like external hard discs, pen drives and others. These
devices are small in size and can be carried anywhere in cases of emergency.
Websites – There are several websites available that are specifically designed for storing
and managing medical data and records of the patients. The patients only need to create and
account in these websites and register some information like age, location, contact details and
others. After the account is created, the website will provide a portal to the user in which, he will
be able to upload his electronic medical documents for safe storage (Horney et al., 2016). The
user will be able to retrieve his medical records simply by logging in to his account in the
website. The websites acts on a wider network of cloud and keep backups of all the documents in
different cloud servers in case one server is attacked and information is stolen.
Hospitals – Some hospitals have well developed information systems and they used
computerized networks for handling patient data i.e. they store electronic copies of medical
documents like prescriptions, x-ray reports, pharmacy details and others in their own servers.
The disaster recovery plan for paper documents of patient information are as follows.

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Hospital Records – Most of the hospitals store paper documents of medical records of a
patient if he is admitted to the hospital at least once his lifetime. These paper documents are
generally kept for future references and one copy is provided to the patient while one or more
copies are kept by the hospital authority (Eisenman et al., 2014). In cases of disaster recovery,
the hospital authority can be contracted with suitable proofs of identity for retrieval of the
medical documents of that particular patient. It is the duty of the hospital IT department to ensure
the electronic records of patient data are stored in a secure server. Also, it is the duty of the
hospital authority to maintain the paper documents for future use and reference.
Insurance Company – Insurance companies can be used for disaster recovery of data
only if the user has subscribed for insurance. After a certain disaster, the user can reach out to the
insurance company for retrieval of medical documents that he has previously submitted to them
for insurance premium. It is the duty of the insurer to protect the medical documents submitted
by the clients for future use and reference.
Medicine Stores – Some large medicine stores use their servers to store every transaction
details of the customers along with their names and contact details (Cook, 2015). The user may
be able to retrieve paper documents like medicine bills from the store by using his personal
details as stored in the server of the store. It is the duty of the medicine stores to keep a copy of
the bills along with the patient names for future reference.
Personal Physicians and Healthcare Providers – Many people have their own personal
physicians and healthcare providers who store some medical documents of the patients. In cases
of disasters, these physicians and healthcare providers can be asked to provide a copy of such

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medical documents that can then be used by the patient for treatment in hospitals. It is the duty of
the patients to ensure a copy of the prescription is kept and stored by the physician.

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References
Cook, J. (2015). A six-stage business continuity and disaster recovery planning cycle. SAM
Advanced Management Journal, 80(3), 23.
Eisenman, D., Chandra, A., Fogleman, S., Magana, A., Hendricks, A., Wells, K., ... & Plough, A.
(2014). The Los Angeles County Community Disaster Resilience Project—A
community-level, public health initiative to build community disaster
resilience. International journal of environmental research and public health, 11(8),
8475-8490.
Horney, J., Nguyen, M., Salvesen, D., Tomasco, O., & Berke, P. (2016). Engaging the public in
planning for disaster recovery. International journal of disaster risk reduction, 17, 33-37.
Nelson, R., & Staggers, N. (2016). Health Informatics-E-Book: An Interprofessional Approach.
Elsevier Health Sciences.
Sahi, A., Lai, D., & Li, Y. (2016). Security and privacy preserving approaches in the eHealth
clouds with disaster recovery plan. Computers in biology and medicine, 78, 1-8.
Sword-Daniels, V. L., Twigg, J., Rossetto, T., & Johnston, D. M. (2016). Unpacking Long-term
Disaster Recovery Processes: A Case Study of the Healthcare System in Montserrat,
West Indies. International Journal of Mass Emergencies & Disasters, 34(1).