Backing up Physician Office PC's

Backup, backup, backup - that's the name of the game. Your practice is nothing without good backups and SupportNet is seeing more and more physician offices that do not secure locally saved data on PC's.

With the growth of hosted Practice Management and EMR applications, practices are finding little need to install and maintain a server environment. The convenience is great. Users connect to practice software over the internet from any workstation available. This eliminates the costs associated with daily administration of a server and puts the server backup responsibility on the host company.

The byproduct of this topology is that practices are neglecting to backup other important files saved on the computers such as Microsoft Office, QuickBook or other applications. Since most Practice Managers or Directors don't share files with other office staff - because their responsibilities don't overlap - they don't need a central resource to share the files.

An easy and cost-effective solution to this is to install a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device. SupportNet recommends a NAS server that can be RAID 5 configured for redundancy purposes. These devices can start at $800+ for 1 terabyte of storage and work off your current internal IP scheme (192.168.x.x). NAS servers do not run an operating system, thus eliminating the need to patch the OS, load anti-virus software or add/delete users.

After setting up the NAS, you can either map a drive from each PC to the device and save files directly to storage or create a script to backup locally saved files on a daily basis. Creating a script inherently creates some redundancy by maintaining files on both the PC and NAS.

Who is SupportNet, Inc. and SupportMed.net

Founded in 2001 by John Goff, SupportNet, Inc. is a Columbus, Ohio-based healthcare IT solution provider offering hospitals, health systems, independent physician groups, hospital-based physicians and other healthcare entities with a wide range of skills and experience to help them thrive in a challenging, rapidly changing healthcare IT environment.

SupportNet's services are designed to shield healthcare organizations from the complexity of managing and supporting their own devices such as PC's, Laptops, Servers, PDA's and other network assets. We focus on creating customized solutions to meet our clients' specific challenge in: network management, mobile point of care, end-user support, data backup, web presence and technology procurement.

Through our IT procurement site, SupportMed we offer an easy-to-use online resource to shop and compare over 400,000 hardware and software products - specific to the needs of physician practices, hospitals and other healthcare entities.