Web-based applications and therapy documentation software have become the standard for modern productivity, and for good reason. But web applications bring an inherent risk with them: what happens on the day the internet goes out? Why did web-based software solutions develop? What is the advantage of web-based systems? What can we do when applications become temporarily inaccessible due to outages? Let’s explore these questions in today’s blog.
Why Did Web-Based Therapy Documentation Systems Develop?
Web-based applications caught on quickly as the internet became a standard household utility. Their ability to connect from any computer and nearly any location without having to carry around heavy computer hardware made them more than worth the monthly subscription fees. With a web-based application, a user can switch seamlessly between a laptop, desktop, tablet, or smartphone with no context loss or data migration. This convenience alone drove the revolution toward web-based systems.
Web-based software also took the administrative and maintenance burden off the consumer. Old desktop-based software required the user to download and install regular updates to meet the most recent documentation requirements and gain the latest features. Usually, these updates were harmless other than the delay in starting up the application or the occasional system reboot. But every few updates, an issue would arise that required long conversations with support technicians and IT personnel to get the system back online. Web applications offloaded this burden to the company that created them, a crew much better trained to handle the complexities of ever-changing software.
And lastly, single-purchase software was expensive. While the modern subscription model can feel overwhelming across dozens of services, the cost has never been more approachable. A company might have needed to sell its single-install software for thousands of dollars, which brought only limited technical support and training—and still required monthly fees for maintenance or advanced support. Instead of this overwhelming initial cost, quality managed web applications provide their product, maintenance, support, and training for a single modest monthly fee.
What Are the Advantages of Web-Based Therapy Software?
The decreased maintenance and more approachable costs have already been addressed, but additional advantages include availability, data protection, and security.
Availability may seem like a confusing item to put in the advantage category considering the recent rash of outages, but a high-level view clarifies the claim. First, computers fail and fail often. If your local computer dies, you have to buy a replacement, install all your software, negotiate the license with your sales rep so you don’t get double charged, and maybe, after a few days of hard work, you can get back online. But with web-based software, if your computer fails, you just switch to another one. Large data centers have hundreds of thousands of computers, and when one experiences a hardware failure, you are seamlessly migrated to a new machine without even realizing it happened. A local failure now results in downtime equivalent to how long it takes to walk over to another computer or open your laptop.
Data protection is a more complicated endeavor. If your hard drive fails on your local computer, everything on it is lost, including all your medical documentation. Some tech-savvy individuals may mitigate this risk with good backup practices, but such expertise is expensive and hard to find. Even with good local backups, they can’t protect against disasters such as fire or flood. In those cases, that extra hard drive or USB backup may still be destroyed, and files are lost despite the best precautions. Web-based applications handle this by storing data in multiple locations simultaneously (called RAID). If a storage device fails, the system recovers the data without the consumer even realizing it happened. Large data centers also use advanced power regulation and fire safety procedures that drastically reduce disasters. Finally, with proper configuration, even extreme events such as earthquakes, fires, or floods can be reasonably recovered from using offsite backups. A disastrous total loss of a location results in little to no data loss, and the system can be restored in a few hours or days, all without the consumer needing the technical knowledge to recover the data.
Security often gets misrepresented. News stories about big data breaches and hackers get major headlines but show only one side of the story. A single plane crash with a hundred tragic losses will make headlines for a month, while the same number of people are lost in car accidents every day with little notice. Cybersecurity follows a similar pattern. Small local offices suffer constantly from petty theft of equipment and exposure from poorly secured networks, far more often than large-scale breaches. Well-managed web applications are typically much safer than any local office can be. The physical data centers have security and alarm systems that rival the Pentagon, far beyond what any medical facility could manage due to cost and open access. If a user approaches from the digital side, they must pass through dozens of military-grade protections before even reaching your software provider’s safeguards. And even if someone were to bypass these physical and virtual barriers, the information is encrypted and virtualized. A thief would need a big rig to steal your physical data, and a hacker would need similar-level resources to get past the encryption. All of this happens seamlessly, behind the scenes, without the consumer needing to understand the technology.
The Risk of Web Applications
Of course, it’s not all rainbows and butterflies in the web application world. The single clear advantage of locally hosted data is that it’s local. If the internet goes out, your data is still on hand. And the internet, in the end, is just a network of computers, and if there’s one certainty in life, it’s death, taxes, and computer failures.
Local outages are the most common. Hardware failures, poor network upgrades, localized disasters, or simple mistakes can result in the internet not working for a few hours or even days.
Large-scale outages of the internet are rare and often caused by flaws in infrastructure. These large outages act as warnings for major companies to shore up defenses and add redundancy to their networks. Such outages usually last around 24 hours and create inconvenience across industries.
The product itself can also be a point of failure. Bugs in code, poor configurations, or cost-cutting choices can result in data or availability loss at the product level. This highlights the greatest risk of web applications: trust. Users must come to terms with the fact that in order to gain the many benefits of a web-based application, they must trust someone else with their data. Many organizations require federal and corporate oversight and quality controls that mitigate some of that burden, but these protections are often lighter at the application level. When it comes time to choose which company to trust with your data, it’s time to ask who is worthy of that trust.
Outage Workarounds
There are some workarounds for the inevitable internet outage. Depending on the nature of the outage, the solutions look different, so we’ll cover three scopes: local, large-scale, and application-level.
Local outages are the most common issue. When your computer or facility loses connection this is called a local outage. An easy mitigation step is to perform regular maintenance of your internet hardware. Most outages result from old equipment. Refresh wireless routers every two years and wired modems and routers every five years. Most outages will simply stop happening with this basic maintenance plan. If the internet does go down, confirm it isn’t isolated to your computer by checking another device. Then try resetting your router and modem, as your provider may have updated something that caused a disconnect. Finally, call your internet service provider and ask them to investigate. While personal accounts are cheaper, commercial accounts offer faster support and more stable service. If outages are a concern, use a business-level account.
Additionally, local outages are, by nature, local. A few effective workarounds include changing location, changing providers, or piggybacking on a neighbor’s connection. Changing locations can be difficult but is viable for smaller practices. The gym downstairs with an unused private room can be an excellent fallback for an hour-long outage. Seeing a patient at their home can also work if equipment needs are minimal. Changing providers doesn’t necessarily mean firing your current service, sometimes it just means turning on your phone’s tethering feature. Most modern web applications run reasonably well on a low-bandwidth connection as long as you avoid large uploads or downloads. As a last resort, you can borrow your neighbor’s Wi-Fi, with permission, of course. With SSL encryption, all these methods remain HIPAA compliant as long as you trust the network you’re connecting to.
Large-scale outages cannot be “worked around.” They must be prepared for. Temporary loss of documentation software is inconvenient but manageable, notes can be written on paper or in a local document temporarily. The real issue is loss of scheduling access. The best defense is preparation: make it a nightly discipline to run and export your schedule to a spreadsheet or PDF. Combine this with a legal pad for check-in times and adjustments, and recovery will be complete by the next day.
Application outages also cannot be “worked around.” Preparation is similar to that for large-scale outages. Download a spreadsheet or pdf of the schedule. Report an outage to your application’s help desk as soon as it’s clear it’s not a local or large-scale issue. Watch for planned downtime announcements, as updates are the most likely time for an outage. Finally, choose a company with a strong reputation for availability, transparency, and quick recovery.
QuickEMR’s Actual Uptime
In the end, all these tools and practices come down to one question: who do you trust with your data?
QuickEMR has maintained 99.99% uptime over the last two years and has never lost customer data in its 25 years of service. We feature secure daily offsite backups of all data and a flexible infrastructure that makes outages rare and short when they occur.
If you want a therapy documentation system with high availability, strong security, and fully protected data, sign up today for a demo.