See Antivirus.

Virus protection is essential for HIPAA compliance and data protection. No antivirus solution is perfect however. If a computer does become infected, and you have been regularly performing quality backups of your Open Dental data, recovery is possible, hopefully with minimal data loss.

Once a virus has been detected:

1. Decide if data is corrupted. Open Dental can help identify corrupted data. If it is corrupted, you will need to rely on a backup of data (see step 3 below).
2. Remove the virus and clean the computer. This may include virus scanning and reformatting the computer. Consult your IT department.
3. Use a backup of your data and recover accordingly. Open Dental can assist with restoring a backup to the server.

Open Dental cannot help you remove a virus, decrypt data, uncorrupt data, or backup data. However, we can assist you with restoring a backup to a uninfected machine.

Also see Antivirus Best Practices.

Known Examples

CryptoWall/CryptoDefense: This virus, and others like it, may encrypt your data and request that you pay money to decrypt it. This is effectively a corrupt database.