HIPAA TIP: Tabletop Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity Tests

A tabletop test is a meeting to review and discuss a simulated emergency situation and concrete plans to manage the fine details of the occurrence, and aftermath of a natural or human-made disaster. 

Tabletop testing gives insights into how well a disaster recovery, business continuity plan, or incident response plan is set to help respond to the event, uncovering strengths and weaknesses, and allowing an organization to directly address them before an actual event unfolds.

Conducting a tabletop exercise can help train staff, raise their levels of awareness of the plan, and verify their capabilities to communicate, respond and recover from various events. Consider one of these six scenarios for your next tabletop exercise:

• Cyberattack

• Active shooter and workplace violence

• Data corruption or data loss

• Natural disasters

• Multiple disruptions

Tabletop exercises can be customized to your organization in order to focus on the communication, response and recovery skills you want to work on with your staff from a particular scenario.

Once completed, your tabletop test results will give you and your team a good indication of how prepared you are for a certain event.