This article provides recommendations and BestNotes resources to help your company design its own disaster recovery policies and procedures, ensuring continued access to critical client information even during unexpected outages.

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Disaster Recovery Strategies and BestNotes Resources

BestNotes strives for 99.9% (or better) uptime, however there may be instances where BestNotes is unavailable due to circumstances outside of our control.

Key Considerations

When designing your disaster recovery plan, consider the following questions: What would you do if all power was lost? What would you do if Internet was lost for your facility but not city wide? Do you have an alternate Internet Service provider? (e.g., mobile device hot spot, second Internet connection to the site) How often should I save this information?

General Recommendations

  • Store information in a location that is:
  • Secure. As protected health information (PHI) will be included in any exported or printed material, make sure it is in a secure location or on an encrypted drive. Consult your IT team for what will meet your company's needs.
  • Accessible, water and fireproof safe

Here are some resources available to use in BestNotes as your company designs their own disaster recovery policies and procedures.

Report Exports for Disaster Recovery

  • Related Contact by Tag displays all clients and their related contacts
    • Be sure to click the Order by: Client
  • C - Appointment Status - Run this for future dates. For example, if your disaster recovery plan includes having a week's worth of patient information and appointments exported and stored, run this on Friday for the following week.
  • Daily Census if not using Episodes (Levels of Care) to show active clients
  • P - Weekly Census with locations if using Episodes

Exporting Current Client Files

  • Activity Logs:
    • No Filter
    • Click Print All button
    • Print to PDF
  • Face Sheet
    • Having a current copy of all active clients or clients with an upcoming appointment will give you an overview of the information and a way to contact them if needed.
    • Print to PDF

Using the BestNotes API for Data Retrieval

If you decide to design and develop your own offsite data retrieval methods, the BestNotes API (Application Program Interface) can be used to pull information. The information available includes:

  • Client Demographics
  • Episodes (Levels of Care)
  • Data Form fields
  • Diagnosis
  • Medications
  • and more ...

One advantage of this solution is having data for third-party reporting systems to create dashboards or custom reports using the information pulled from the API.

Next Steps

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