This guide acknowledges the importance of a well-designed disaster recovery plan that will protect health information and business information from damage, minimize disruption, ensure integrity of data, and provide for orderly recovery.

This guide suggests methods to protect the confidentiality and security of healthcare documentation during a disaster.

It is intended that this guide will contribute to compliance with laws and regulations to improve protection of health information documentation and data integrity with the development of the contingency plan requirement.

This guide will explain key points to include in preparing a disaster recovery plan to resume operations and minimize losses due to unscheduled interruption of critical services if a disaster would occur.

This guide is intended to assist in the development of appropriate policies and procedures that provide protection for individually identifiable health information in a secure environment in the event of a disaster.

1.1 This guide applies across multiple medical transcription settings in which healthcare documents are generated and stored: medical transcription departments, home offices, and medical transcription service organizations (MTSOs). Currently there is no standard disaster recovery plan in the medical transcription industry to provide guidelines for individuals, departments, and businesses to use for designing a disaster recovery plan for their medical transcription environment.

1.2 A disaster is when a sudden event brings great damage, loss, destruction, or interruption of critical services. These guidelines could assist in developing an organized response to reduce the time for loss of services, maintain continuity of workflow, and speed the overall business recovery process.

1.3 This guide supports the HIPAA Security Rule for ensuring data integrity with a contingency plan to include a data backup plan, a disaster recovery plan, and an emergency mode operational plan.

1.4 This guide is consistent with the requirement for disaster planning and recovery procedures as stated in Guide E 1959.

1.5 This guide is not intended as a disaster recovery plan for Health Information Management Departments or for an entire healthcare facility.