Many medical practice administrators believe their organization is protected because “we have backups.” When asked about disaster recovery, they point to the same backup system. This confusion between backup and disaster recovery creates significant risk, because backup alone cannot restore operations quickly enough when systems fail.
The distinction matters because patient care depends on system availability. A dental practice that loses access to patient records for a day faces inconvenience. A medical practice that can’t access medication histories or allergies during an emergency faces potential patient harm. Understanding what backup does and doesn’t provide helps practices build appropriate protection.
What Backup Actually Does
Backup creates copies of your data at specific points in time. When data is lost, corrupted, or accidentally deleted, backup allows you to retrieve a previous version. Good backup systems run automatically, store copies in multiple locations, and retain data long enough to recover from problems that aren’t discovered immediately.
For medical practices, backup protects against scenarios like accidental file deletion where a staff member accidentally deletes patient records or critical documents. Backup:
- Addresses data corruption when software bugs, hardware issues, or malware corrupt database files.
- Provides protection from localized hardware failure such as when a hard drive fails and the data on that drive needs to be restored.
- Satisfies compliance requirements since HIPAA mandates maintaining retrievable exact copies of ePHI.
What backup doesn’t do is restore your ability to operate quickly. If your server fails, backup gives you the data, but you still need a functioning server to restore it to. If ransomware encrypts your practice management system, backup provides clean data, but you need working infrastructure and applications before that data becomes useful.
The gap between “having backup data” and “resuming operations” is where most medical practices have exposure.
What Disaster Recovery Provides
Disaster recovery encompasses the complete capability to restore business operations after a disruption. It includes the systems, procedures, and infrastructure needed to get your practice running again within a defined timeframe.
Disaster recovery addresses infrastructure failure when your server, network equipment, or entire office becomes unavailable through planned recovery to alternative infrastructure. It covers extended outages caused by power failures, internet outages, or building issues that last longer than your practice can operate manually. DR provides resilience against cyberattacks since ransomware and other attacks require not just data recovery but system rebuilding and security validation. It also addresses geographic disasters like fires, floods, or other events that affect your physical location.
The key components that make disaster recovery more than backup include alternative infrastructure (somewhere to restore systems to), recovery procedures (documented steps for rebuilding your environment), communication plans (how staff and patients are notified during outages), and defined recovery objectives (how quickly you need to be operational).
Understanding RTO and RPO
Two metrics define what disaster recovery capability you actually need: Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO).
RTO answers: How long can the practice operate without this system? If your EHR goes down at 9 AM, do you need it back by 10 AM? By end of day? By tomorrow? Different systems have different tolerances. Patient scheduling might survive a few hours of downtime. Medication dispensing systems might need to be restored in minutes.
RPO answers: How much data loss is acceptable? If you restore from a backup taken last night, you lose today’s work. For some systems, that’s acceptable. Systems recording real-time patient data experiencing even an hour of data loss might be unacceptable.
For most medical practices, critical clinical systems require RTOs of 2-4 hours and RPOs of 15-60 minutes. Administrative systems might tolerate RTOs of 24-48 hours and RPOs of several hours. These requirements should drive technology decisions, not the other way around.
According to research from the Ponemon Institute, healthcare organizations lose an average of $7,900 per minute during system outages. For a medical practice, even a conservative estimate of $500-1,000 per hour in lost revenue, staff productivity, and patient disruption adds up quickly during extended downtime.
Why Medical Practices Get This Wrong
Several factors contribute to the backup-disaster-recovery confusion in medical practices.
IT generalists vs. specialists: Many practices rely on general IT support that focuses on keeping systems running day-to-day. Disaster recovery planning requires different expertise, specifically understanding healthcare compliance requirements, recovery procedures, and the clinical impact of system outages.
Cost focus without risk context: Backup is relatively inexpensive. Full disaster recovery capability costs more. Without understanding the actual cost of downtime (lost revenue, overtime costs, patient safety risks, HIPAA exposure), practices often choose the cheaper option without recognizing the tradeoff.
“It won’t happen to us” thinking: Until a practice experiences a significant outage, disaster recovery feels theoretical. The practices that invest in comprehensive protection often do so after learning from a painful incident.
Vendor confusion: Some backup vendors market their products as “disaster recovery” when they only provide data protection. Practices believe they have recovery capability when they actually just have backup.
What Right-Sized Disaster Recovery Looks Like
Medical practices don’t need enterprise-grade disaster recovery infrastructure. They need appropriately scaled protection that matches their clinical and business requirements.
For small practices (1-5 providers): Cloud-based backup with defined recovery procedures and access to temporary computing resources may be sufficient. The key is having documented steps for restoration and tested procedures for operating during recovery. Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS) solutions with cloud recovery options provide data protection with faster recovery than traditional backup alone.
For mid-sized practices (5-15 providers): Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) provides standby infrastructure that can be activated when primary systems fail. Data replicates continuously or near-continuously to the recovery environment, enabling recovery within hours rather than days. DRaaS eliminates the need to maintain secondary hardware while providing genuine recovery capability.
For larger practices and multi-location groups: Hybrid approaches with local recovery options for minor incidents and cloud-based recovery for major disasters provide flexibility. High-availability configurations for critical systems can reduce unplanned downtime further.
Regardless of size, all practices need documented recovery procedures that staff can execute, regular testing to verify that recovery actually works, and communication plans for patients and staff during outages.
Questions to Ask Your Current Provider
Whether you manage IT internally or use an outside provider, these questions reveal whether you have backup, disaster recovery, or something in between.
Recovery time: “If our server failed right now, how long until we’re operational?” If the answer involves ordering hardware, rebuilding systems from scratch, or “it depends,” you likely have backup without disaster recovery.
Recovery testing: “When did we last test a full system recovery, and what were the results?” If testing hasn’t happened or results aren’t documented, you don’t actually know if recovery will work.
Alternative infrastructure: “Where do we restore to if our primary systems are unavailable?” If the answer is “we’d figure that out,” you have backup without a recovery destination.
Procedure documentation: “Can I see the documented steps for recovering our practice management system?” If procedures don’t exist or aren’t current, recovery will be improvised rather than executed.
Building Appropriate Protection
Start by assessing what you actually have. Review your current backup configuration, retention periods, and recovery procedures. Test restoration of critical systems to understand actual recovery times.
Then define what you need. Identify your critical systems, determine acceptable downtime and data loss for each, and calculate the business impact of extended outages. This analysis often reveals that the cost of disaster recovery capability is modest compared to the cost of a significant outage.
As a Veeam Platinum VCSP Partner, Opti9 provides backup and disaster recovery solutions scaled to medical practice requirements. From basic BaaS for smaller practices to full DRaaS for larger organizations, the approach matches protection level to clinical and business needs without overbuilding infrastructure.
For practices uncertain about their current protection level, Opti9’s backup and DR assessment evaluates existing capabilities against actual recovery requirements and provides recommendations for closing any gaps.
