Being aware of your EMR emergency access solution is vital in the case that your practice experiences internet connectivity issues. The other day we had a call from a user in California who had her Internet connection interrupted. When staff members in her clinic tried to log in to use SOAPware, they received an error message and were unable to access any charts form any workstation. The clinic was open and still seeing patients, thus employees needed access to patient records.
The doctor’s questions were:
- “Why can I not login and see records from my workstations?
- “Can I get access from at least one workstation until our Internet access is restored?”
Logic was telling her there had to be a way, and she was right. The solution to this situation is to login to SOAPware on the server computer. (The user should login to SOAPware on the server computer using his/her normal SOAPware login ID.)
Why login on the server? When there is Internet connectivity and a user logs into SOAPware on a network workstation, one of the first things that happens is a security/license check. A message is sent directly from the network workstation to the SOAPware license server over the Internet. This message is a request for authentication of a current SOAPware license. If authentication can be made, then SOAPware on the clinic workstations can access the data stored in the database on the clinic’s server. If authentication fails, the database cannot be accessed. However, if a user logs into the sever , SOAPware will still have local database access: this means that they can read patient charts, even if authentication fails due to lack of Internet connectivity.
CAUTION: This is a temporary emr emergency access solution and should only be considered as such. Do not make a regular practice of bypassing license authentication!
This solution could be used as part of an overall disaster recovery plan. I suggest that this, and at least one other alternative work-around to Internet connectivity loss be integrated into the Disaster Recovery Initiative of every practice.
If you are encountering a problem which requires other immediate assistance please click here to contact SOAPware support .
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