Plan carefully for data recovery
Know what info you need, how to re-enter it
When the hospice nurses' laptops at the St. John Home Health and Hospice in Tulsa, OK, stopped synchronizing with the agency's server, agency management and the software vendor worked through the weekend to identify and solve the problem.
The only solution was to replace the database on each laptop, which would erase the data entered during the two days the software had a problem. "We knew we had to recover the data [first], so we compiled a list of the reports and information that needed to be pulled from each laptop before we replaced the database," explains Melody Lahann, MS, MHCA, director of education for the hospice.
Visit notes, time and mileage reports, medication lists, care plan updates, and physician order were the most important information categories included on the checklist developed to ensure that the same data were collected from each laptop, says Lahann.
Nurses were called over the weekend and told to bring their laptops into the office first thing Monday morning. "As they came in to the office, we had the nurses give us their passwords, and we wrote their names and passwords on a checklist and attached it to their computers," explains Lahann.
Because the laptops were working with no problem, Lahann and her team connected them to printers and began printing the reports that contained information they needed to retrieve. "We just printed out the visit notes and filed the paper notes in the office. We did make a note in the electronic health record that visit notes for the dates involved were located in the patient's paper file in the office," she says. The nurses working with Lahann on the recovery effort used office computers to re-enter clinical information such as order updates and care plan updates. "Clerical staff re-entered the time and mileage information needed for payroll," Lahann adds.
On the two business days that it took to retrieve information and replace the databases so that the laptops would be able to synchronize with the hospice server, nurses went back to using paper forms, she points out. "Thank heavens we kept our paper forms," Lahann says with a laugh. "We just made up packets for each patient to be seen that included a cover sheet, driving instructions, an updated medication list that had been printed off the laptop, and a form for visit notes."
Even though the hospice's information technology emergency was frustrating and not an experience that Lahann wants to repeat, she does say it could have been worse. "This happened in our hospice not our home health agency which has 90 users and hospice doesn't use OASIS [Outcome and Assessment Information Set]. I don't want to think about recovering information on OASIS from 90 laptops!"
Need More Information?
For more information about information technology emergencies, contact:
- Rajesh Shetye, MS, MBA, Executive Vice President, Information Services, VNA Healthcare Partners of Ohio, 2500 E. 22nd St., Cleveland, OH 44115. Phone: (216) 931-1500. E-mail: [email protected].
- Melody Lahann, MS, MHCA, Director of Education, St. John Home Health and Hospice, 4720 S. Harvard Ave., Suite 202, Tulsa, OK 74135. Telephone: (918) 747-7901. Fax: (918) 747-7904. E-mail: [email protected].
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