In Florida it's huricanes, in California - wildfires, in Atlanta - flooding. It seems that Mother Nature has a little something special in store for you no matter what part of the world you're in. Here in Ohio, it's snow....and boy, oh boy, we've had a lot of it the last few days! I'm sure that most of you have seen the news about the debilitating snow - it's even shut down the Federal Government! How, then, you might ask, does AIMM ensure that services continue, despite Mother Nature's attempts to foul things up? Well, it's a very good question, and you might be surprised to know that you're not the only one curious for the answer - URAC, our accrediting agency, gets pretty interested too! Ensuring that AIMM has a solid "Disaster Recovery Plan" is a part of what URAC looks at when we go through the accreditation process.
First, let me say, that AIMM isn't concerned just about snow - we've got plans for it all - starting with the most simple "disaster" scenario like a computer malfunction, all the way up to the most catastrophic scenario like the office building burning down and all our equipment being lost!
Second, I would point out that we're all a bunch of "old ER & ICU nurses" (not old in terms of age, just in terms of experience :-)...we're really all truly young, pretty, etc :-) ) We're a pretty tenacious and resilient bunch. We know that people get sick even when the weather is bad - sometimes it even feels like people are more likely to be sick when the weather's bad. All in all, we're pretty used to working through any adverse conditions - and neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night, nor the winds of change... (well, when a slogan's good, you've just got to adopt it, right?!) And, fortunate for us, we use only RNs (old ER & ICU RNs - old enough to remember the days of charting on - dare I say it - charting on paper with a pencil (gasp!!!) - if worse came to worse we'd break out the papyrus and graphite...whatever it takes to get the job done and the patient taken care of!).
Thirdly, we are an extremely techno-savvy organization. We LOVE technology, and if you've gotten to know us at all, you've probably seen firsthand that we're "all over" the computer stuff....every piece of equipment in our organization is the latest, greatest, most nimble, and most user-friendly, piece of technology on the market. (It helps that our COO is a techie/geek :-) ) I am able to control every aspect of our operation remotely. Need a phone system change, or a routing change made on the fly - no problem! Need a key piece of information, call me. It doeesn't matter if I'm in Timbukto or the office. I can get you what you need, and I can do it quickly!
Fourth, we've got back-ups for our back-ups! We back up our data in multiple different ways...some of those are immediate backups, some are hourly, some are nightly. We've got the main server in the office, and we've got TWO back-up servers. If the building burned down and "everything" was lost, we still wouldn't have lost everything - we've got servers and computers stored offsite! All we'd have to do is load the backup data onto one of the spare servers, and we'd be live in a matter of minutes!
Fifth, we test, and test, and re-test, and on and on and on! We try to break the system. We're constantly challenging the technology to make sure that it isn't going to fail us.
Those are just the "highlights" that I have room to describe here - there's even more! AND YES - it's all 100% secure, encrypted, HIPAA compliant, etc....
So, as one of my favorite Christmas carols says...let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!
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