Disaster recovery planning that actually works for health care.
A new framework bridging adaptive business continuity methodology with HIPAA regulatory requirements. Built for the reality of US health care organizations.
Learn why this mattersTwo approaches. Neither works alone.
Health care organizations know they need disaster recovery planning. HIPAA's Security Rule includes contingency planning requirements for covered entities and business associates. But the regulatory language doesn't align cleanly with existing frameworks, leaving organizations to interpret requirements through methodologies that were never designed for health care's unique regulatory environment.
The result is a gap: compliance activities that consume enormous resources while failing to deliver actual protection when disasters strike.
Traditional Disaster Recovery Planning
Over-engineered, under-deliveredLegacy methodologies demand months of cause-based planning before any protective work begins. Separate response plans for every identified threat consume limited staff hours, producing documentation that sits on shelves and fails organizations during actual disasters. It is also not possible to anticipate every scenario - and when a disaster does strike, the cause is largely irrelevant to the response. It does not matter whether a tornado or a ransomware attack took down your EMR server. What matters is that the server is down and these systems are impacted. Rural hospitals with 1-2 person IT teams simply cannot sustain cause-based planning while keeping the lights on.
Adaptive Business Continuity Alone
Principled, but non-compliantModern adaptive methodologies improve on traditional approaches with practical, streamlined principles. But they explicitly advocate omitting risk assessments and business impact analyses. In health care, regulatory expectations still require formal risk analysis and documented contingency planning activities. An approach that de-emphasizes these requirements exposes organizations to compliance risk regardless of how effective it may be operationally.
Health care organizations deserve a methodology that delivers both regulatory compliance and real disaster recovery capability, without drowning limited teams in documentation that provides no actual protection. Patient care continuity depends on it.
That is what ABC HIPAA is being built to address. A healthcare disaster recovery framework designed from the ground up for the realities of US health care, with particular attention to the resource constraints facing rural and smaller organizations managing critical systems with limited staff.
The framework is built with efficiency by design. The process of applying ABC HIPAA naturally surfaces risks, gaps, and dependencies as you build real recovery capabilities - providing a strong foundational feeder for maintaining your HIPAA-required risk analysis over time, not as a separate documentation exercise but as a byproduct of the work itself. This allows IT staff who are already wearing multiple hats to build real recovery capabilities and strengthen their risk analysis in a single effort.
Framework and publication forthcoming.
ABC HIPAA is currently in active development. The framework, manifesto, and supporting materials are being refined for publication, with the goal of providing operationally meaningful disaster preparedness for health care organizations of all sizes.
Based on Adaptive Business Continuity methodology by David Lindstedt, Ph.D. and Mark Armour