Be Prepared: Natural Disasters & Your Dental Practice

You can’t predict a natural disaster, but you can plan for it.

Cyber security breaches get a lot of attention; unfortunately it’s pervasive across many industries in the world. But many overlook a palpable risk — losing data due to physical damage. In the past month, we’ve seen the devastating effects of Hurricane Florence and west coast wildfires. If your practice experiences a catastrophic event, are you prepared?

Insurance alone will not save your practice

Whether you experience a natural disaster or a common plumbing issue, who’s responsible for the lost data when your server gets damaged? Dentists, like many other businesses, will have property insurance. It may cover structural damage, such as repairing your office, or replacing damaged equipment, including your server. But does it protect against the loss of critical patient data? Does it account for the time and lost revenue while your practice isn’t operational because you can’t access patient records?

Make the best out of a difficult situation

Tens of thousands have been evacuated from wildfires in Utah, California and British Columbia. During Florence, over 1 million people were under mandatory evacuation, with about 15,000 North Carolina residents fleeing to stay in shelters, hotels or the homes of family and friends. These residents were not only forced out of their homes, but their places of employment as well. It’s worth noting that North Carolina is home to nearly 5,000 dental practices. If these dentists had a cloud-based model, displaced employees could work from home, scheduling appointments, calling patients, ordering inventory, etc. In fact, some of our Utah-based employees were displaced after a mandatory evacuation from the wildfires. We’re in the cloud, they could still work, and our business continued as usual without a hiccup.

Minimize your risk

If your practice is not in the cloud after a disaster hits, all your software has to be reloaded to your server in order to run your practice. This is a time-consuming, stressful event that can take several days or up to two weeks.

However, if you store your patient data in the cloud, rest assured no disaster can touch it. You can access anything you need — patient records, appointment times, etc. — from anywhere, enabling employees to work remotely. While there may be physical damage to your practice, your practice won’t be crippled. Once the damage is repaired, you can immediately begin seeing patients again.

If you’d like to learn more about moving your practice to the cloud, please reach out to us at 866.647.1102, or email us at sales@curvedental.com.