IT consulting company uses MozyPro to help health clinics meet HIPAA requirements
“I can tell our clients with confidence how easy it is to use MozyPro and walk them through a restore, and that’s assuring.”
Zac Childress of DarwinTech, Inc. began to explore backup options in the health care industry after assisting a physician with her computer crash. Now he uses MozyPro to compliment his company’s electronic medical records software and help his clients comply with HIPAA regulations.
It wasn’t until a physician contacted him in his office regarding a computer crash in her home that Zac Childress of DarwinTech, Inc. began thinking about backup in the professional scene. “All her personal information on her home computer was gone, but she told us she had Mozy and asked us to help her restore her files,” Childress said. “It was our first experience with Mozy and it worked beautifully.”
As a reseller of IT services and products in the health care industry, Michigan-based DarwinTech provides its clients with electronic medical records and software to help their clinics operate smoothly.
Childress realized the results could be catastrophic if any of his company’s clients lost patient files due to hard drive failure or disaster. With documentation being performed by physicians themselves, recreating even the 50 or so patient files created in one day would be virtually impossible without significant loss of time and money.
Going paperless increased the industry’s efficiency but now also requires health clinics to comply with HIPAA laws, which mandate how personal health information must be stored to maintain privacy and security.
“I talked to other offsite backup companies and they were all so expensive,” Childress said. “They wanted us to pay a monthly fee that we weren’t even comfortable talking to our clients about. Obviously if we were to lose data, the loss would have been tremendous but we just couldn’t justify paying their high prices.”
Additionally, many such backup solutions do not meet government-enforced HIPAA requirements for data encryption and remote storage. So when HIPAA-compliant MozyPro was released to the public in December 2006 at a fraction of its competitors’ prices, DarwinTech signed up as a reseller within the first week, confident it was the best way to protect data in the health care industry.
MozyPro encrypts data with 448-bit Blowfish encryption before it’s sent to its servers, and all data is sent through a secure 128-bit SSL tunnel to its Tier IV data center. For security beyond HIPAA requirements, a private encryption key may be chosen during installation as well.
Yet among the complexities of HIPAA regulations, Childress enjoys the simplicity and peace of mind MozyPro offers him and his company’s customers.
“I can tell our clients with confidence how easy it is to use MozyPro and walk them through a restore, and that’s assuring,” he said. “MozyPro tells you what you have available to back up, and you just click a few buttons.”
Now with more than 20 licenses under its reseller account, DarwinTech uses MozyPro to help its clients in 22 U.S. states and Canada. It offers online backup as an additional service to its clients, who typically purchase hardware, software, and IT services ranging from $20,000 to $30,000. An additional $150 or so each year to safeguard their customer’s private health data is hard to refuse.
Rarely, however, do DarwinTech’s medical clientele want to know how MozyPro works – they just want to make sure it’s working. To them, ease of use is the most attractive feature.
“If they want to know how everything works, we’ll teach them, but I don’t think we’ve run across a single client who has wanted to know,” Childress said. “They just want us to take care of everything.”
Many health care professionals prefer delegating backup to someone else, enabling DarwinTech to find clients in its other business ventures as well. DarwinTech is a corporate sponsor of the American Academy of Podiatric Practice Management, where often it has the chance to speak to 200 or more physicians at conferences regarding products for home and business.
“We encourage them to do offsite backup with MozyPro because peace of mind doesn’t come any easier,” Childress said. “We take care of it and they don’t have to worry about a thing.”