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Workers’ Compensation Team’s Guide to Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity Planning

This guide is intended to improve your understanding of the options for disaster recovery and business continuity planning for workers compensation claims management teams. In addition to helping you identify, minimize and in some instances, eliminate business risks. This guide includes a checklist to help you strengthen your workers compensation program and provides guidelines for discussions you should have within your workers compensation team and how these services will be reconstituted following a disaster.

Scope of Plan

Your plan must address four core areas:

1. Restoring core information systems in the event of a disaster, and how your workers' compensation team will continue to operate for business continuity.
2. Identify key suppliers and interfaces required for continuous operation
3. Restoring utilities
4. Instructions and procedures

This plan is not intended to be a detailed, step-by-step series of instructions to follow. It is intended to be a roadmap to lead the recovery team from the incident, through a decision making process, to implementation of restored services. Although it is targeted at the most likely types of disasters that could be encountered, it may be adapted as necessary for recovery from other situations.

Recovery Team

It is critical to keep an updated contact list for the recovery team.

Disaster Scenarios

Part of the risk process is to review the types of disruptive events that can affect the normal running of the workers' comp team. There are many potential disruptive events and the impact and probability level must be assessed to give a sound basis for progress. To assist with this process the following list of potential events has been produced:

• Equipment or System Failure
• Loss of Utilities and Services
• Transportation/Site Inaccessibility
• Environmental Disasters
• Organized and / or Deliberate Disruption
• Serious Information Security Incidents

Environmental disasters and deliberate disruption are not covered individually. These usually disrupt service because of an interrupt in utility or transportation service and are covered in those areas.

Equipment or System Failure

All critical equipment or systems should have several layers of protection. This can include redundant drives and servers with local and remote backups. All plans should include procedures, timing, and transportation requirements to restore a backup image and make it operational. Other strategies can be off-site storage of tapes or other storage media; the best and fastest recovery strategy will be redundant mirrored "sister sites" which actually mirror the information exactly at another geographical location far enough away not to be affected by the disaster.

Loss of Utilities and Services

Identifying equipment and systems required for continuous operation, often this includes servers and phones. These devices should be connected to emergency backup systems. These can include emergency batteries and generators. Other systems may not be part of the critical infrastructure and can be supported by decentralization including desktop computers, scanners or copiers. Phone and Internet lines should support redundant and independent paths such as land lines and wireless (microwave) connections.

Transportation or Site Inaccessibility

Plans should include events where the computer systems are operational but office staff cannot be physically present to their workstations. With web-based systems normal operation at secondary sites or home computers can ensure that business can continue and claims can be processed in a timely fashion.

True Stories

These are real events that led to loss of availability and access to claim documents. If you have a true story to add to this collection, please send it to us at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Equipment Failure:

• Set up: Medical claims office
• Amount of information: 4 employees entering approx. 30 patient records entered per day, 5 days a week. In business for 7 years
• Back up procedure: Monday - Thursday (incremental backups), Friday (full back up)
• Disaster: Friday morning, 1 hour before the full backup is performed, the hard drive failed. Went to retrieve the full and incremental backups only to find that there was not any data on any of the incremental tapes. They had to go back to the previous Friday backup and then re-enter all of the current week data manually.

Fire Disaster:

• Set up: Medical claims office with five managers struggle to reconstruct the business after a huge fire destroyed all claim records
• Amount of information: Claim office with 50 adjustors entering 30 claims per day, 5 days a week. In business for 20 years.
• Back up procedure: Computer data backup with off-site systems and storage in off-site locations
• Disaster: Fire destroying millions of records. Data recovery took months because of the lengthy process to retrieve, transport and restore the information. Much information was found incomplete because it was not adequately archived. Simple list of all open cases were not archived and needed to be recreated.

DataCare Corporation

DataCare Corporation provides full disaster recovery and business continuity with web access to all of our documents and reports. We provide multiple layers of redundancy including three fully mirror "sister sites" for your critical workers' compensation claims. Our computer servers, phones and Internet lines have redundant and independent paths of local landlines and wireless (microwave) connections. Even in the most severe disaster, you can be up and operational in hours. Please contact us at 866-834-2334 or This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it for our complete disaster recovery and business continuity plan.

Checklist for Disaster Recovery Plans

• Do you have the backup systems in place to keep the business running?
• Are backups automatic and done in periodic intervals, such as every minute, every hour or every day?
• Do you have generators?
• Where are backups kept?
• Do you have mirrored data centers and servers?
• Do you have a backup ISP or telco provider?
• Following a disaster, how long before you are up and operational?

How Long Will It Take To Be Up And Operational?