Social Media as part of your marketing plan is used by companies to change mindsets, reinforce their practice’s “brand”, and extend their organizational goals. Social Media should always be a complementary part of your marketing mix and your practice should begin by considering your total marketing goals before creating your Social Media presence. If your practice already has a website that contains educational materials, use your Social Media apps to drive traffic to this already present content. When you are offering a new product or service that your patients might not fully understand, create a long-term strategy to educate them about the product or service by posting updates with a new piece of information each time.

Your selection of Social Media applications should be used to apply the practice’s marketing goals while targeting distinct social communities. Your patients currently meet in different online spaces where they learn about, comment on, and influence others opinions about products and services they personally care about. With over 200 different Social Media applications to start your conversation from, it is important to understand what applications make the most sense for your practice. Having a Facebook fanpage so you can update your patients on what is going on at the practice might make sense for some, while having a YouTube account and posting educational videos about procedures might be more beneficial to others. Using your Twitter account to link your latest press releases to, or the use of educational blogs about specific ailments, is a quick and easy way to spread awareness of your practice’s products and services. Your Social Media goals should focus on corporate awareness, public relations duties, and a recognizable increase in patients and improved search engine rankings for your company’s website.

As with most marketing initiatives, reaching your Social Media marketing goals requires commitment and a desire to engage your end client. What makes Social Media different from other marketing tools is that it requires dedicated manpower to maintain. Once a website has been created, it will continue to bring information to prospective and current clients when that patient reviews your corporate site. Newspaper, radio, and television ads need only to be created once and then set against an automated schedule that will provide results assuming your message is powerful enough. On the average, a successful Social Media campaign requires someone to be committed to managing the practice’s Social Media strategy for at least 1-2 hours per day. With that being said, it is important that your employees don’t allow Social Media to become a distraction from their day-to-day responsibilities and kill their productivity. The need for dedicated manpower is why it is important to have top level and employee buy-in in order to have contributors for content.

A solid user policy must be set in place to ensure everyone understands the boundaries of Social Media tools while at work. Your Marketing team lead should develop a policy explaining your practice’s guidelines for the use and integration of Social Media. This step becomes more important when multiple people are responsible for updating and contributing to the practice’s Social Media sites. The policy should describe the Social Media tools that are acceptable for use at work, what is appropriate or inappropriate to discuss through the practices’ site, and even what to do in the case of discovery of bad publicity about the practice from Social Media sites. Each practice, as part of their Social Media strategy needs to define what your company culture is and what kind of participation can be expected from your staff.

Finally, a way to measure the results of your Social Media efforts need to be put in place so that changes to the overall marketing plan can be adjusted. There are range of paid analytics tools, like Omniture, and free analytics tools, like Google Analytics, Quantcast or YouTube Analytics, can be implemented by your inhouse marketing team to review the fruits of your efforts. Whether you are looking to increase patient traffic to your office, enhance your reputation in the community, or just want to supplement your other marketing efforts, a benchmark needs to be set.

Organizations often do not store a copy of their backup media off-site which could compromise their data if the office is affected by fire, flood, or other disaster. Some of the more traditional methods, such as tape and disk, can be a bit cumbersome. They also require investment in hardware and software, such as tape drives or optical drives, and the backup media to go in them. Any backup solution requires the proper training for staff to know how to use the media as well as proper protocol for their use. Online backup services can be used as an alternative or in addition to traditional methods.

Instead of sending backups to a tape drive or other media attached to the computer it is backing up as with conventional backup solutions, online backup software sends the data over the Internet, regular telephone lines, or other network connections to an online backup server safely offsite. In order to keep the system resources your practice uses through the day at a normal level, this service is usually performed at night while computers are not being used. Backups can also be done on-demand, any time.

An advantage of online backups is the freedom from worry about your media degrading, becoming obsolete, or no longer being compatible with your recently upgraded software.Online Backups are done on schedule, reliably where most businesses don’t do this because of various factors. Usually it’s because the person responsible for doing backups, if the office has officially designated one, is too busy doing something else, someone is using the computer when it’s time for a backup, or they simply forget. Since remote backups are done with automated software usually at night, when nobody is using the computer, backups are always done on schedule.

Online backup does have inherent disadvantages and this solution is usually chosen as an additional, redundant manner of backing up your data.

A major disadvantage of online backup is that the speed and amount of data backed up is limited by the speed of your Internet connection. The uploading of files to a remote backup system and accessing uploaded files can be slow.

While most online backup companies claim your data can be backed up over regular internet connections, these backup sessions are handled over multiple days. This means that if something happens before your full backup occurs, a loss of integrity occurs. Additionally, if you’ve made revisions to a file since the last time it was stored and your PC crashes, you’ll only be able to recover outdated versions of your work.

Online backup over a dial-up connection is generally only suitable for small amounts of data — up to around 500 MB. Over a broadband connection, up to 10 GB of data transfer is feasible, but may still be slow. For larger amounts than this, you’re likely to need a leased line or a T1 line that can cost in excess of $800/month.

A DSL internet connection only allows for a 700KB/second download speed and a 150KB/second upload speed for data. So, for the average office having around 30GB of data, they would need to upload 30000000 KB of data for a complete backup. (1GB = 1,000MB = 1,000,000KB). Based on these numbers, to backup 30GB, it would take 200,000 seconds or 3,333.33 minutes or 55.55 hours to perform a complete backup of your 30GBs of data. In other words, it would take more than all day, 24 hours each day, on Saturday and Sunday to perform a full system backup.

No matter how easy it may be to retrieve documents from a remote server, does anyone really have the time to reinstall and reconfigure all those programs and settings on their computers? And more importantly, how can you access a web site to download your data if your PC crashes and the Windows operating system (OS) won’t load? No OS, no web access.

Online backup companies charge ongoing monthly charges, which can be prohibitively expensive if you need to back up large amounts of data. For the average office with 30GB of data, this fee could range from $1,200-$10,000/year depending on the number of versions retained, etc. These same funds could be used toward onsite backup solutions that allow data restores within hours instead of the weeks it would take to download your backup files from online. When you do make use of online backup solutions as your sole backup source, you’ll be entrusting all your valuable data to someone else that potentially could go bust or otherwise place your data at risk.

164.308 Administrative safeguards (7)(ii)(A) Data backup plan (Required). Establish and implement procedures to create and maintain retrievable exact copies of electronic protected health information.

A recent survey stated that only 37 percent of companies that back up their data actually test its integrity and recoverability. And about 77 percent of that group fail to restore their data within the defined business recovery window or don’t recover at all. Hence, less than 10 percent of companies succeed at recovering vital business data using their existing data backup processes.

The Security aspect of HIPAA is the specific measures a health care entity must take to protect personal health information from unauthorized breaches of privacy and measures taken to ensure against the loss of integrity of personal health information, such as might occur if patients’ records are lost or destroyed by accident. The intent of backing-up data is to help ensure its availability by transferring and storing duplicate data at a secondary location. However, simply transferring data to another environment without verifying its integrity or the ability to restore it within a defined business timeframe is a recipe for disaster.

An important facet of computer security involves protecting electronic data from loss or corruption – that is, ensuring its integrity. Although there are many ways data integrity can be affected, the most common is loss of data from some sort of emergency or disaster, including human error, mechanical hard disk failure, equipment damage due to flooding, or computer virus infection.

HIPAA requires organizations to have a contingency plan to continue operations in the event of data loss. This contingency plan MUST include details concerning the data backup and recovery process, who handles the backup media, the media rotation process, where the media is stored off-site, how quickly it can be retrieved in the event of a disaster, and all other aspects associated with data backups, protection, security, storage, and recovery. Data loss can result in further losses of productivity, patients/customers, and revenue. In many cases significant data loss will result in lost business. Fortunately, the damaging impact of data loss can be negated with a qualified data protection solution as part of your contingency plan.

A backup system is a combination of hardware and software that lets you retrieve exact copies of information if the originals become lost or damaged. There are several kinds of commonly used backup systems, including those that store data to tapes, compact discs or off-site devices. The equipment and service can cost from hundreds to thousands of dollars, and the best method for your practice can only be determined after you know how much data needs to be backed up. Your choice also will be influenced by cost, convenience and ease of use. At a minimum, your practice’s backup system should store all of the critical data needed to run the practice in the event of a disaster. Practices should conduct an analysis to identify these critical data.