Health Information Technologies for Practicing Psychiatrists

Backup and security

It goes without saying that the information stored on the computer and smartphone is more valuable than the one-time purchase cost of these devices. Information backup is mission-critical for the psychiatric practice, and the backup frequency is based on the number of days the practice can afford downtime to restore the systems. If zero days of downtime can be afforded, then a redundant array of independent disks (RAID) is necessary.¹⁸ By setting up RAID level 1, the information written on a hard drive will always be copied to the secondary drive in a process called mirroring.

In addition to on-site backup, off-site backup is highly recommended. This can be set up either with a portable hard drive that is carried home every day or via an online data storage system. The Western Digital “My Passport Elite”¹⁹ is an example of a portable backup system with automatic, continuous backup, password protection, and 256-bit hardware-based encryption. Mozy²⁰ and Dropbox²¹ are examples of online backup systems that provide excellent security with encryption of files via secure socket layer over the Internet as well as encryption on the company servers. Backups can be automatic or scheduled and can be set to backup only new or changed files.

Conclusion

This article has described a few of the mission-critical health information tools for psychiatric practice. Many practices will use some or perhaps only 1 of the above-mentioned devices or Web sites. It is frustrating for the practicing psychiatrist that many of these technologies change every year, with improvements in speed, data capacity, or even newer features. To help weather this ever-changing landscape, it helps to maintain the attitude that technology changes or upgrades only make sense when the new features or capabilities save time or simplify the workflow process.

It is perhaps without question that today’s psychiatric practice has “gone digital,” leaving the analog for now to the patient-physician interaction in the office.