The VNA was so well prepared for disaster than when a fire gutted its 1440 W. Mockingbird Lane building on Feb 19, nurses never missed a shift. The VNA’s information technology systems had a tremendous amount to do with that stellar continuity of service and the quick recovery that has followed.

Of course the best outcome of the fire is that no one was killed or even hurt. The story Chief Information Officer Wyatt L. Davis tells of how little information the VNA lost also is a happy one. Although HIPAA has forced people to focus on the security and privacy of data, disasters and accidents always loom as threats to data, too.

By far the smartest moves VNA made were not only to adopt electronic medical records, but also to host them offsite. VNA uses CareCentric’s STAT system for basic patient information and couples that with a custom-built system for electronically imaging other documents and images. The organization is moving to the Misys Home Care System for the next version of its EMRs.

The data hosted at the SBC Internet Data Center at Webb Chapel Road and I-635 remained instantly accessible to staff via a wide area network that served the headquarters and branch offices in Fort Worth, Denton, McKinney, and Kaufman, Mr Davis says. Obviously, none of the data in that system was lost and it remained accessible even as the VNA headquarters was in flames. Remote hosting can be an attractive option for an organization that has several separate offices. Smaller businesses, such as a one-office medical practice, don’t need to host data offsite, but they should consider backing up data regularly and storing those backups in a safe place.

Using a safe place, such as a fire-safe file cabinet, is part of the VNA’s story, as well. Before all paper patient records are scanned and stored electronically, they are stored every night in a fire-safe file cabinet. For this reason, Mr Davis says, all but the paper records that had yet to be scanned were recovered after the fire. VNA had the benefit of being almost paperless but also of taking care of the paper it did have.

The VNA did suffer losses, Mr Davis acknowledged. Of the association’s 145 PCs, about 100 had to be replaced. The 40 computers that survived had to be professionally cleaned, as did the surviving networking gear.

The loss of phone service as a result of the fire proved a real hindrance. Because VNA hosted a main telephone switch for headquarters and its branches at the Mockingbird Lane site, the organization lost phone service for two weeks while the sooty, $750,000 switch was being cleaned and reassembled.

It is inspiring to reflect on this potentially disastrous disaster and realize that because of information technology—and the easy movement and storage of data it allows—the VNA survived the fire in a way that never would have been possible when all data was on huge bulky volumes of paper. But simply having the technology was not enough. It was the foresight and preparation of the VNA’s staff in using that technology that saved the day.

The author of this monthly column, David Orenstein, is a technology and business writer in Silicon Valley. If you have a question about a Computing Care column or to request a future topic, email him at davealli@comcast.net.