Disaster Planning

We were talking the other day about the impending tragedy in all of the Southeast, that of rotting or unreadable paper patient records or even destroyed hard drives and machinery to make those drives work in the wake of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

In a post to linux med news I had talked about using a distributed, secure warehousing system for holding medical records. FreeMED, an open source practice management and electronic/ computer record system may have a solution. This differs from individual based solutions or from having (heaven forfend) the government in posssession of medical records. The records would be encrypted and readable only by the pass key holder.

When we designed FreeMED, which is web based, we knew that the weakness in backup was the busy schedule of the physician. We knew that despite the best of intentions, regular backups might be made but piled over the server so that a disaster would destroy both machine and backups. Although taking a weekly backup off site seems a great idea, having an electronic system removes the decision making, or lack thereof, from derailing backups.

At first we used rsync to make backups on servers which were not co-located. It means that backups from my machine in Hartford, CT were available in Windham (at my home servers) and in Claremont, NH. The difficulty; not HIPPA compliant. As a beta test, however, a wonderful idea.

Since the data is XML why not use PGP keys, warehouse the data on servers with set aside partitions, almost like a distributed RAID array. With regular (mine backs up hourly) incremental backups, recovery can be 100%.

How can FreeMED do this? We use a document management system so that 100% of documents can be electronic including received faxes, previous hard copy charts, images, and even laboratory results (see Linux med News Story). What we propose is that the government become involved in the warehousing, setting up vendors for distributed data holding. Since the data is unreadable, no one can use the data other than the key holder, the physician of record; since it is distributed, a disaster in any quadrant or area of the country would not affect other areas.

Lets prevent disaster, not become one.

Proactive, forward thinking, ready.

Thats todays GnuNews