Emergency Preparedness Mandate is Almost Here

With Hurricane Harvey having just made landfall in Texas we are all reminded of how important it is to be prepared for an emergency. If you are a Home Health Care Agency it might also remind you that the Emergency Preparedness COP requirements must be implemented by November 15, 2017 which is right around the corner. This requirement includes a comprehensive risk assessment as well as specified training and testing. The requirements are focused on three key essentials necessary for maintaining access to healthcare during disasters or emergencies:

• safeguarding human resources
• maintaining business continuity
• protecting physical resources

According to the guidelines to comply you must:

• Risk assessment and emergency planning
• Policies and procedures
• Communication plan
• Training and testing

HealthWare is prepared to assist you in meeting these requirements in a many ways:

• If you have on premise software that runs your agency we can help you back it up to the cloud to help insure that you can be back up and running should your facilities be affected by a disaster.
• We can back up all your critical data securely to the cloud and restore it back onsite when your facilities and services are restored.
• We can host your application or applications directly in the cloud and even replicated to additional data centers.
• Our home health and hospice software offers complete offline charting capabilities so that all your clinicians can have patients charts with them always and can continue to provide patient care until your facility and services are back up and running.
• Our home health and hospice software is integrated with SMS/Texting and can be used to help keep in touch with employees and patients. Mobile phone communications are often one of the first forms of communication restored after a disaster.
• We can provide other hosted applications such as email, document sharing and more through Microsoft Office 365. Keep critical communications going when there is a disaster by having it in the cloud.

Contact us at 850-479-9035 or visit us at www.healthware.com

For more details on guidelines and strategies for compliance with the Emergency Preparedness Mandate see Advanced Copy- Appendix Z, Emergency Preparedness Final Rule Interpretive Guidelines and Survey Procedures