I received the following email from Delwin Beene, Director of Accreditation at Community Health Choice in Houston, Texas. I wanted to share it with URAC staff because it shows the importance of our accreditation standards, particularly our disaster recovery standards, when a disaster strikes such as Hurricane Harvey.

We closed our offices on Monday and Tuesday due to streets and freeways being flooded. We implemented our disaster recovery plan and transferred all calls to our call center vendor in San Antonio. Even through the storm, we had staff interfacing with the San Antonio call center so that we were able to respond to member needs. While some employees are still dealing with flooded houses and loss of automobiles, we opened with a skeleton crew yesterday, with more employees returning today. We are still using our vendor in San Antonio to manage the call volume due to limited staff. Since the last time, you were here, we have opened a second office due the growth in the Health Insurance Marketplace. That office could not open until today.

One of the critical items was people who evacuated without medication and helping them to get their scripts refilled. The governor allowed us to refill, even if it would normally be a “refill too soon” situation, since the Houston area was designated a disaster area. Our back-up data centers were out of the path of the storm. 

So, even though we were officially closed on Monday and Tuesday, there were plenty of people working to make sure phones were answered and we were able to serve our members.

The key components are to have redundancy in your data centers so that you can “fail over” to a site out of the storm’s area plus you have a call center that is also out of harm’s way. Also, not having the servers at the same location as the plan’s operations helps to assure business continues even during a disaster.