Protecting Your Chiropractic Practice Data: Tips and Tools | Podcast Ep. 219

Foreign hello and welcome to the Evidence Based Chiropractor. I AM your host, Dr. Jeff Langmaid and I am very, very happy to be back. This episode is going to be a little bit different. We're talking about protecting your practice. I'm going to break down what I have personally gone through over the last few weeks, why there was no episode last week, why this one's a little bit late this week and all of the data issues I have encountered. But also I'm gonna go through a couple proactive steps that you can take to protect your practice so you don't have to go through this unbelievable heartache and stress that I have experienced over the last few weeks. I'm gonna showcase to you a couple tools that I think would be awesome. I don't have anything to do with these products or services, but they are what I am using to make sure I do not deal with what I've dealt with over the last few weeks. And hopefully if you listen close to this episode, you will never have to deal with what I have gone through over the last few weeks. This episode is gonna be all about protecting your practice. And no, I'm not talking about documentation building and coding, I'm talking about your literal data. Quite frankly, whether you have a cloud based EHR or not. I'm gonna really encourage you to listen close to this episode here, hear about what I've went through over the last few weeks and check out the couple tools that I have found because I've been doing supreme due diligence on tools that can help protect your passwords and also protect your data. So let me first kick it off by giving a short version of what I have dealt with so you can understand it and maybe even empathize a little bit. If you remember the evidence based chiropractor you've probably seen, I posted in our members only group saying this is the first time in the last eight years that I have been late with any deliverable. I am playing catch up big time. I literally got my computer back about three hours ago and it is Monday, March 2nd. My computer crashed on February 11th. Now you might be saying to yourself that sounds unbelievably extreme. What does this guy know? Nothing about computers? I think it's a little bit different than that. On February 11th I headed out to Denver, Colorado for a regenerative orthopedics conference. So it's all MDs, DOs, talking about non surgical care. Awesome conference. Spent about 48 hours out there, but on the 11th I opened my computer when I Got to the hotel in Denver, I did a bunch of work on the plane, opened my computer, I'd use a Mac, if you're an Apple person. Open up the computer and I had a blue flashing folder of death. That is not a good feeling to have. But I was only there for about 48 hours. So I thought to myself, no big deal, I will be able to handle this when I get home. I'm pretty busy when I'm out in Denver anyway. Things I looked at online were not good. Made me a little bit nervous. It sounded like it could be a hard drive issue, but I'm pretty computer savvy guy so I was like, I'll figure it out when I get home. So I ended up getting home on the 13th, talked to Apple on the phone for a couple hours. They ran a bunch of diagnostics and they said, it does not sound like your hard drive is in very good shape, sir. And they said it is very likely that you are gonna have to have it at least repaired if not replaced. I hope you have a backup of your data. So here's where step number one comes in. I did have a backup. If you want any of the 99.9% people out there that do not have a backup, please do so. And I'm going to highlight some tools that can make it easy for you. I had a time machine or a time capsule backup from the morning that I left. So thank you. Auto backups. I also had an additional external hard drive backup from November. So I'm kind of a backup kind of guy. So 13th I talked to them for a couple hours at night and they said, gosh, we cannot help you. Sounds like a hard drive issue. Why don't you bring it into the store over the next couple days? And I said that would be fantastic. But I'm driving to Orlando to teach tomorrow. This gets complicated very quickly here. Long story short, I went to Orlando. The next day I went to the Apple store. They looked at my computer, ran a bunch of diagnostics and said your hard drive is toast. And unlike old hard drives that you can unplug and we could plug one in in five minutes and have you back on the road. This is a soldered into your motherboard type hard Dr. So that means we're gonna have to confiscate your computer for the next five days to fix it. We're gonna have to send it out. The team's gonna then fix it off site and then they will ship it back to you. I said, this is not good. I'll save you the heartache of where I went in Orlando and how I got my presentation together, but I got it back Tuesday the 18th. Tuesday the 18th I got it back and the format of the hard drive was incorrect to reinstall and restore all of my backup data. So I went through at that point three days of back and forth with Apple to attempt to get my data back to no avail. However, On Thursday the 20th it looked like things were good, were going according to plan. I had my time capsule restoring my computer and unfortunately I had a death in the family and I had to travel out to Arkansas for four days and my computer was in the middle of a 3:30, yes 3:0, 30 hour backup. During that 30 hour backup I came back on Monday from Arkansas and found out that the backup had failed with 30 minutes left. You can see where this is going at that point. We're talking about Monday the 24th. I went to Apple and I spent. Last Tuesday I spent, I believe I got there at 1:15. It was either Tuesday or Wednesday. I got there at 1:15pm and I was walked out the door by the manager at 10pm and I still did not have my data back because the restores were taking too much time. They were crashing, but they were only crashing when There was lovely 20 minutes left. After hours and hours of data being transferred, it would not finish the job. I of course had a speaking arrangement and gig this past weekend, so then I got to take off again. However, at this point I brought my computer to a certified Apple reseller or fixer, however you want to say that. And I am proud to say that upon my return and this afternoon I went over to that store, picked up my computer and all of my data, all of my applications, and thankfully all of my research and marketing tools are back intact. So long story short, make sure that you have your data backed up. This has been the most stressful two and a half weeks of my professional life. I have been late on delivering things to people which has never happened in my entire career and it has been unbelievably stressful to think about losing all of the data that I've had from my entire career and that's even having these backups. So where I'm going today and my big take home message for you listening is number one. Thanks for tuning into the podcast. I wanted to get this episode out there, tell you a little bit about what was going on behind the scenes. We're gonna be back next week to our regularly scheduled research and marketing programming. However, the two Tools that I would recommend you check out before the next podcast comes out next Monday is a tool called LastPass. L a s t p a s s. LastPass is a password simplifier. It's a password tool that stores all of your passwords and then enables you to access those passwords across any of your devices. So if you are somebody that can never remember passwords, I'm raising my hand right now. If you're somebody who has the same password for every single website, I'm raising my hand right now. But there are variations of them over time and then it starts to become a complete mess and disaster. And when I'm trying to use my wife's computer, when I didn't have my computer for those three weeks, I didn't have access to any of my passwords, I couldn't get in any applications. And not only did I not have any of my data or research, it was super challenging. That challenge would have been not existent if I would have been using something like LastPass, which is stores in a vault all of your passwords so you can access them wherever you are. So it helps you generate stronger passwords. Number one, it helps you create different passwords. Number two, and it helps you store all of it in a way that you can access it. Whether you're on a watch, whether you're on somebody else's computer, you can just log in and get access to all your passwords. Whether you're on your phone, you can get access to all of your passwords. They actually have a completely free version or like the supreme upgraded version is like three bucks a month. So if you are somebody that has more than one device, or even if you're completely reliant upon one device and that device went down, you're gonna be up a creek. So check out LastPass. It remembers all your passwords across every device. It's free or it's three bucks if you want the upgraded version. I've immediately started using this tool because I want to be able to access all of websites, all of my different marketing tools, all of my different platforms. Everything that I need to access, I can now access regardless of whose computer I am on. So that is so time saving and so relieving. Instead of having to play the password merry go round. The second thing that I'm going to encourage you to utilize, and this has been highly recommended to me, is a tool called BackBlaze. Back, like the spine, right? B, A C K Blaze, B L A Z E. BackBlaze is cloud storage that is super, super easy to use and super low cost. So basically it stores in the cloud every file, every piece of data you have in your computer. You don't need to update it ever. It does it automatically. So as you just create things on your computer, download things, it automatically does it up to the cloud. And here's the beautiful part about it. It not only you can restore all of that data, but you can actually access that data. So let's say you wanted to access something on your, on your computer and you're on your phone traveling, you can do it, you can just log in and you can basically see every bit of data. So it's not like in this like super lockdown, it's encrypted, it's safe, but you can have access to it regardless of where you are. And it auto updates and auto backups throughout time. So if you're a Mac person and you say, well I have Time Machine, I want you to be very clear about this. Time Machine stores all of that data locally on your computer. So if your computer has a hard drive issue and crashes and those time machine backups don't do any good for you. So you want to store it either to an external hard drive that you kind of plug in. But very few people remember to do that every week or two, right? It's a pain in the butt. So something like Backblaze, highly recommended to me, it's about 60 bucks a year. But it is going to relieve all pressure where no matter what computer, no matter what device, no matter what you are using, or if you have a complete system crash like I did, you still have access to all of your files. Even if you have a cloud ehr, chances are your personal computer or your, your main work computer has a bunch of stuff that you want to have access to or you might even have, you know, the regulations might say you have to have access to for X amount of time. So using a tool like Backblaze I think is a great idea. So my strategy moving forward, and hopefully this is all about protecting your practice, my strategy moving forward is having a cloud based password system. I'm using LastPass so I can access all of my different applications, all of my programs, all of my platforms from wherever I am, no matter what computer I'm on. And also I'm going to use Backblaze so I can access all of my files wherever I am. So these are the two tools that I am using based upon being like three weeks, three and a half weeks without my computer, without my data. Thankfully I'M so grateful to the people that helped me get it back. It was if you're in Tampa Bay area Scout, that is the company that helped me get it back, I will give them shout outs forever. So Scout helped me get back all of my data. If you've ever had any issues like that, however, I'd love to help you prevent having issues like that. So check out backblaze, check out LastPass. I'm recording this episode. Literally got my my computer back just a few hours ago so I'm just jazzed to get this out there. Super pumped to be back. I apologize for missing last week. I think that's the only the second week that's ever been missed in the history of the Evidence Based Chiropractor podcast. So you can bet we're gonna be back next Monday. Regularly scheduled programming we're talking research, we're talking marketing, and we're gonna talk about things that can help you build and grow your practice in 2020 and beyond. If you have any questions about data and or backup and based upon what I went through, shoot me an email. Jeffevidencebasedchiropractor. Also, if you have been listening, thank you for tuning into this podcast. I think this is the most highly downloaded, highly rated, highly listened to podcast within the chiropractic profession and I appreciate every single person that tunes in. I love meeting people when I'm traveling. I listen to the podcast. I really appreciate all that because I'm filming this or recording this right in my home studio here with nobody in front of me or just myself. So the fact that it reaches 10,000 plus docs each and every week, I am super grateful to you for listening. So if you wanna leave us reviews or feedback, that would be awesome as well. You can do that. If you're listening from your iPhone right from the app itself, you can leave a review or leave feedback. Thanks for tuning in. Have an awesome week in practice. Protect your practice, keep that data backed up and I will talk to you very soon. Thank you for joining us on this episode of the Evidence Based Chiropractor. If you want to grow your practice, come back for next week's episode. If you want to grow faster, visit the evidencebasedchiropractor.com and join our MD Marketing membership today. Sam.