A lot of what we do these days with data, um, as we discussed is very, very important. So you want to maintain data, manage it appropriately, uh, et cetera, because it is a valuable asset on a daily basis. But some of these things like backups and archiving you shouldn’t try to do yourself. And the reason for that is that backup in archiving isn’t a core competency that you need to have in your clinical environment. You want to make sure that whoever is doing your backup in archiving has been doing this for a long time in a detailed way, understands all the ins and outs, knows what problems you have with backups and archiving.

I’ve seen a number of times when people believe they’re doing the proper backups, and then they realize when they do their restore, oops, something didn’t work. Why? Because it was — it was a job for a part time person in the IT department. He was doing his job. He pressed the backup button every time, but never did a restore to figure this out and say that, yes, the restores work just as well as the backups do. Or the same thing with archiving. You thought that the archive compliance requirement was seven years, but it turned out that in a particular jurisdiction, it was nine years. Well, you’re going to pay for that at some point, and so what you really should do is is to say is this a core competency of my clinical environment? Do I care that, uh, that this is something that I want to build out and hire for internally?

And the answer is usually no. There are lots of companies out there doing a much better job than you will ever will on your own because you’re supposed to be taking care of lives, managing patients, et cetera, not trying to, uh, deal with IT assets all day long. But this is so important. It’s not a back end function. It’s not something you just hand to somebody on the back end and say, “Oh, can you just make sure you’re doing backups, uh, on a regular basis and just let me know if that’s working?”

Because the restores of a backup and being able to retrieve from an archive have to be regularly tested. And unless you’re doing that on your own, you’ll never know whether or not, uh, that it’s working. And because you’re never going to have time to do it, you really want to do — you really want to outsource it, find the right people, get someone who knows what they’re doing and has been doing it for a long time with a lot of companies. It’s very important.