Is your backup HIPAA-compliant, and how does the Business Associate Agreement work?

Name: Digital Systems Integrators, LLC
Address: 2654 N Marine Dr,, Portland, OR, 97217, United States
Telephone: 503-289-3105

Yes. Our onsite and cloud backups are encrypted and meet NIST SP 800-111. The practice provides the Business Associate Agreement to us, and we can supply a blank template if you need one.

HIPAA-Compliant Backup & Data Protection for Dental Practices

The most dangerous backup setup is the one that lives in a single place. If your practice’s data exists only on one server, or only with one provider, a single event, a hardware failure, a ransomware attack, or a breach at whoever manages your systems, can take all of it at once. For a dental practice that means patient records, treatment histories, and imaging, and quite possibly the ability to open your doors and see patients the next morning.

The principle is simple, and it shapes everything we do here: your backup should never depend on a single point of failure, and it should never live entirely in the same place as the data it is protecting. We provide complete backup solutions that keep your data safe, HIPAA compliant, monitored, and kept up to date, so that a hardware failure, a ransomware attack, or an ordinary human mistake never turns into a catastrophe your practice cannot recover from. There’s no initial investment and our Disaster Recovery Plan includes all maintenance, monitoring, loaner workstations in the event of a caststrophic event.

What we set up, and what makes it compliant

Here is what we set up and what actually makes it compliant. For practices across the Pacific Northwest, we start with an onsite survey of your practice, because we cannot recommend the right solution without understanding how your office really works. From there we typically recommend a setup built for resilience: a server that provides redundancy so a single drive failure does not take you down, onsite incremental backups that capture your data continuously through the day, and cloud-based backups when you want that extra offsite layer. The principle behind all of it is that your data should always exist in more than one place, so that losing any single copy never means losing your records. We provide secure onsite and offsite backups for a small initial investment and a low quarterly fee, which is a great deal easier to absorb than the cost of reconstructing a practice’s records from nothing.

Compliance is not a marketing word for us, it is a technical standard we actually meet. All of the backups we use are HIPAA compliant and encrypted. Our onsite and cloud backups meet the NIST Special Publication 800-111 standard for the encryption of stored data, which is the recognized benchmark for protecting data at rest. We are a reseller for Carbonite for cloud backup and for BackupAssist for local backup, the tools we have come to trust to do this properly, rather than whatever happens to be cheapest that month.

What happens when something does go wrong matters just as much, because a backup you cannot restore from is no backup at all. Because your data is kept in more than one place and monitored and updated, we can help you recover it and get your practice back to seeing patients rather than starting over. Our aim is always to keep catastrophic data loss and downtime to a minimum, which for a dental practice is the whole point of having a plan in the first place.

Encrypted email, because HIPAA requires it

There is one more piece of HIPAA that trips up more dental offices than backup does, and that is email. HIPAA regulations require all medical email correspondence to be encrypted, full stop. Patient privacy and data security matter enormously for your practice, and while many dental offices have taken some of the steps toward compliance, a lot of them do not realize how deep the actual requirements go until something forces the issue. We are a certified reseller for DataMotion and can set up encrypted email for your practice so that your everyday patient correspondence is genuinely covered, not just your stored data.

How the Business Associate Agreement works

Finally, a word on the Business Associate Agreement, because the direction of it confuses a lot of people. For a dental practice, HIPAA requires a Business Associate Agreement with any provider who handles your protected data. The practice provides that agreement to us, not the other way around. If you do not already have one, we are happy to give you a blank template to get you started, and we will work under your BAA to keep your patient data protected and compliant. It is a small piece of paperwork that matters a great deal if the question ever comes up.

The practices that get hurt are almost never the ones who planned for backup in advance. They are the ones who assumed their existing setup was fine, or that their all-in-one provider had it covered, and found out otherwise at the worst possible moment. A few minutes of planning and a modest quarterly investment is what separates those two outcomes.

Contact us for a complimentary network and security assessment, or call 503-289-3105.