NextGen EHR Downtime System Provides Data Archive and Backup

As a healthcare practice, you can’t serve patients without access to your electronic health record (EHR). If the Internet or your network goes down, or your systems are compromised by a cyberattack, your practice screams to a halt.

• How do you handle EHR downtime?
• What are the implications?

Even planned outages for routine updates or maintenance can impact your ability to make appointments, see patients, and stay on top of billing. And with more frequent updates from NextGen to meet regulatory requirements and add functionality, such as the upcoming 6.2021 upgrade, you may find that you need a plan to keep your practice humming in case the upgrade takes longer to go live than you hoped.

A NextGen downtime solution addresses all these challenges.

What is a NextGen EHR downtime solution?

A downtime solution for your NextGen EHR lets your practice continue to leverage your clinical data and care for patients, even without live access to your EHR or data. It’s based on a specialized archive of your data. In case of an outage (planned or otherwise), your providers and staff can simply switch to the downtime app and access the synchronized copy of your data instead of the live system. The app ideally has a familiar look and feel that’s similar to the NextGen EHR they typically use, so the switch is quick and intuitive. And after the downtime event, the app should automatically sync the data entered back to the live system, since the last thing you want is to have to manually reenter everything that happened during the outage.

The backup for your downtime system can be stored in the cloud or on-premise, depending on your concerns. For instance, a local server with backup power may be the right choice for concerns about local power or Internet outages from storms or other emergencies. An on-premise or cloud-based backup server can also be separated from your network, so you can more easily protect the backup data in case of a security incident in your live NextGen environment. Since the downtime backup is typically much smaller than your live environment, it can be scanned for malicious code much more quickly than the entire environment and spun back up to get your practice running again as soon as possible.

What are the requirements of a NextGen EHR downtime solution?

The key to this sort of solution is to ease the stress of a downtime event and continue your day-to-day processes inside the clinic. Preparing a downtime process yourself, however, can take extensive time and resources to cover all the bases. To ease the burden of creating these processes, most practices search for a third-party solution to meet their needs.

As you set up your downtime solution, you will need to explore three key requirements:

1. What does your staff need to continue to see patients?

• What data is relevant to patient visits?
• How far back in time should the backup of data relevant to visits be?
• How do you access this data during a downtime event?
• Is access to the data user-friendly?

2. How do you continue documentation as you see patients?

• Would physicians be able to document patient visits?
• Would front desk staff be able to take patient calls or review demographics?
• Is generated / scanned information available for review during visit?
• Can physicians review previous diagnosis codes, medications, or allergies?

3. What do you do with the new data once the downtime event is over?

• Is the data accessible for review?
• How do you get the data back to the EHR?
• Who enters the data to the EHR?

The answers to these questions will help your team define what solution will work for your practice.

How should a NextGen EHR backup and downtime solution be set up?

Once you’ve decided on a downtime solution, you’ll need to consider the ideal configuration for your needs. Those needs may vary widely based on everything from the type and size of your practice, to your location and external risks such as storms or unstable Internet connections.

These three elements will help you decide the scope and requirements for your situation:

1. Decide how to approach data storage outside of your current EHR storage, using one of these options:

• Choose an on-site solution where the data is in-house and accessible despite Internet issues (example, on-site server or new server tower on location).
• Choose a cloud solution that allows access outside of internal network issues (example, cloud-hosted server users).
• Choose a hosted Azure solution users can access remotely.

2. Decide data collection for storage outside of you current EHR:

• Choose what items are relevant for backup (EHR Documents, Appointments, etc.).
• Choose what frequency items are backed up (typically 30 minutes to no more than an hour).
• Decide if a separate file share is required for backed-up Items.

3. Decide if there is a way to automate the syncing of data and access the data outside of your EHR:

• Determine how the solution would sync data.
• Determine how the solution would allow access to data during downtime event.

MTS NextGen Downtime System

The MTS NextGen Downtime System is a data archive solution and downtime app that allows clinics to use their data outside of their current NextGen environment. The MTS downtime app looks and feels similar to the live NextGen EHR, so providers and staff can continue to work without a significant change to their normal workflows. The system offers interactive and insertable data and automatically updates all records created during the downtime event. This is in stark contrast to other downtime approaches. Instead of automatically storing files to the database as the MTS NextGen Downtime System does, others typically only write to PDF files of patient charts, meaning those files must be manually reentered into the live NextGen environment after the event.

A Windows service automates the collection of NextGen data for storage in the backup database designated for downtime.

 

The MTS Downtime System keeps a database backup of relevant medical data that providers and staff can use to continue to see patients, including appointments, documents, etc.

Configure the service to your practice needs with NextGen data on a polling interval such as every hour  

Choose the types of data collected from the NextGen database and root folder.

This data that is synced to the MTS Downtime Database backup is pulled from the NextGen database on the configured polling interval.

The EMR options will check for any downtime SOAP and telephone notes created during an event. This polls automatically and will insert templates to an encounter in the EHR.

There is also a file share that stores the backed-up documents and images from the NextGen system to be accessible and viewed or printed. You can designate the document management and EHR documents you want to view during a downtime as these are copied to the downtime file share for use in the downtime EHR.

View documents in real time while seeing your patient at their visit

The MTS Downtime System application is an intuitive approach to the provider workflow. The data is pulled from your clinic’s current NextGen EHR and is accessible outside of the NextGen environment. The application is what your providers and staff would use in a downtime event to continue to care for patients.

How the MTS Downtime System works

Say it is a busy Monday morning in the clinic and out of the blue, Internet access is lost. Since the clinic is cloud-hosted, they are unable to access their patient data. The clinic staff quickly accesses the downtime app, which is either published to their internal Citrix environment or to their local machine on the local network.

Staff and providers can now use the Downtime System application to access relevant data with patients. Since the clinic had their Downtime Data being backed up every hour from NextGen, they can utilize the application to view and access current data such as seen below.

An at-a-glance approach to viewing patient data (appointment, demographics, etc.)

View labs and results

View scanned images

View medications and allergies

View patient diagnoses

Document a phone note that syncs to NextGen

Document a SOAP Note that syncs to NextGen

Don’t let downtime shut down your practice!

Learn more about the MTS NextGen Downtime System. Contact us for a free online demo and see how you can protect your practice from planned or unplanned outages that could disrupt patient care and business activities.