Who’s planning for the worst?

What is the cost of starting over
In the world of business, especially as a Software company there has been a push since 1999 to be sure that your company has a disaster plan in place, just-in-case something happens.  A Business Continuity Plan (BCP) or disaster plan is the least expensive insurance plan a company can have, as it costs virtually nothing to produce, if you do it yourself.  Adjuvant Technologies has spent time making sure that our company can still provide a valuable on-call scheduling and management service even if our office is not accessible.

Recently I have spoken to many prospective customers who have not given much thought to the question of “what would happen if the person or Doctor who creates and manages the providers’ on-call and work schedule was gone and the information was not available in your office?” “Do you have anyone cross-trained in creating and maintaining the physician schedule?”  ‘Do you have the process documented?”  “Do you have the complex rules documented on paper?”  “Where is all of your information located?”  “When was the last back-up?”  If the answer to any or all of these questions is “I don’t know” or “no”, you need to keep reading this.

According to website WiliHow.com, there are several steps the partners can take to be sure that your most critical items have been carefully thought through and you have an accessible plan that directs the organization in a time of chaos.  Here are the first 9 things to know.

 9 Easy steps

Step 1:  Document key personnel and backups.  These are people without which your business can function.  Doctors and other key providers would be on this list.

Step 2:  Identify who can work from home.  Find people who are capable of working from a home office.

Step 3:  Document external contacts.  Critical vendors, your attorney, banker, hospital contacts, and EMR vendor.

Step 4:  Document critical equipment.  Personal computers, back-ups, fax machines, servers, software.

Step 5:  Identify critical documents.  Articles of incorporation, HR records, lease papers, physician schedule history, on-call tally reports.

Step 6:  Identify contingency equipment options.  Where would you rent computers, a phone system, fax and copy machines, and how quickly could you have all of this set-up.

Step 7:  Identify your contingency location.  Where will you conduct business, where will you be directing patients to in a disaster?

Step 8:  Make a “how to” process book.   This should include step-by-step instructions on what to do, who should do it and how.  This should be done for every “critical process” in your organization.

Step 9:  Put this information together.  This plan is useless unless it has been assembled and can be accessed in case of an emergency.  Be sure to have extra copies.

Practice what you preach

At Adjuvant we began identifying critical systems and process that we would need if our office suddenly did not exist.  Here are some of the things we did.  1)  We used to have our accounting system, QuickBooks located on a server in our office.  We transitioned to QuickBooks online to be sure that we can access the information from anywhere.  2) We also used to have our Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) software located on a server in our office.  We quickly realized that if we did not have access to the office, we would never be able to notify our clients of any problems.  We began using salesforce.com and online company to manage this information off site for us.  3)  As an Application Service Provider (ASP) servicing clinics and hospital emergency rooms, our customers rely on us to keep our equipment up and running.  We relocated all of our production servers to large national hosting facilities that offer costal redundancy.  These are 3 examples of how we used new technology as part of our Continuity Plan.

As the owner of an ASP, I try to tell prospective customers how valuable it can be to have critical information accessible from anywhere via the Internet.  In the case of scheduling physicians, where they are or are supposed to be may be important enough to your organization to make sure it is part of your larger continuity plan. 

Please don’t wait to find out if you will ever need a BCP.  I can promise you that at some point you probably will.  Is yours done?  Ours is!

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Justin Wampach is president of Adjuvant Technologies, developer and provider of Call Scheduler. Contact him at 320-257-7134 or justinw@call-scheduler.com