One of the reasons I have not posted as frequently the last two weeks is the new HHABN from CMS. In the last two weeks I have been working on an article for a trade association publication and a presentation regarding when to issue the new HHABN and which of the new forms to use. Needless to say, both were rather time sensitive.
I flew up to Milwaukee to record a presentation on the new HHABN for the Home Care Information Network or HCIN. (For those of you who know me personally, you know that I love to travel, especially when it involves a trip to the airport.)
HCIN is a company started up by Tom Williams and provides on-demand video training. You can get to their website by clicking here. (Yes, you can see my smiling face and not just hear my voice. Which hopefully makes the whole prospect of HHABN training less painful, or at least not more painful.)
I spent Friday morning with Tom and Trish Tullock from RBC Limited recording the seminar. Trish was my co-presenter and discussed the clinical aspects of the new HHABN and offered some implementation advice. As you probably guessed I talked about the legal side of the HHABN including a little background on what has led to the change.
Needless to say, the three of us had a pretty good time recording the seminar. Although whenever you tape a seminar or do a telephone seminar, the lack of audience feedback is noticeable. I had the chance to eat at one of Miwaukee’s local brew houses had an uneventful trip back home. With that behind me, I hope to return to a slightly more consistent schedule of posting.
Of course, if I don’t I will just blame my children.
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My posts have been rather sporadic lately due to my recent vacation (and recovery from the vacation) and my most recent disaster – coffee spilled on my computer keyboard. Spilling coffee on a keyboard is usually a problem, however, if your computer is a laptop, spilling coffee on the keyboard can be fatal. My recent experience in this area provides another reminder that it is important to backup your hard drive regularly for many reasons, beyond the HIPAA Security Rule.
Now, many of you will immediately think, Bob, you constantly remind us of the importance of backing up our hard drives. Surely, you regularly back up your own hard drive. I must confess that, although I do backup the documents and photos on my hard drive, I do not do this as often as I should.
In this case, I performed a backup of all the important files (read documents and photos) on my hard drive right before I went on vacation. (I get a little paranoid about losing my laptop or having something bad happen to it when I travel.) While on vacation, there was nothing work related added to my hard drive, however I did load 200 or more pictures from my digital camera onto the hard drive.
Upon my return from Hawaii I did not immediately backup my hard drive (read vacation photos). In fact, I neglected to perform a backup at all last week. Which leads me to this past Monday, I managed to spill some coffee on my keyboard. Now for most computers, coffee on the keyboard is a minor inconvenience, for a laptop, it is a major problem, because the keyboard is on top of the computer.
While I was mopping up coffee, the computer stopped (and made a few unhappy noises.) When the computer locked up, I realized that I had neither backed up any of the vacation pictures nor had I backed up the documents I had been working on the week before. Luckily, my major project for the previous week was already on its way to the client. Nevertheless, my laptop was dead and all of the documents I was working on as well as my vacation pictures were at least going to be difficult to access.
If I had performed a backup on my regular schedule, I would not have lost a great deal of time at work. I would have been able to restore my information to one of our spare computers and been up and running in an hour so. Because I had to take the computer somewhere learn that it was most likely dead and have them recover the data from my hard drive, I lost more time than necessary. In this case, no information was lost, but the lack of a backup illustrated another reason for having them, you can get back to work more quickly with one than without.
My accident illustrates a number of points. First, you may need your backup for reasons other than hard drive failure. Second, you should be sure to evaluate your backup schedule and determine not only could you function without certain items, but if you could function without them, how much productive time at work would be lost by having to start them over.
The photos, although personal, illustrate another point, if you are in the midst of a major project, say a proposal for grant funding, you may wish to not only save regularly while you are drafting, but make a duplicate copy of that special file. This may not be a formal backup procedure that is performed regularly, but an additional step taken, because if you were to have an incident that caused you to lose the project, you will very likely have lost a great deal of time.
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