Authored by James Stainton, VP – Operations

Unlike airports that can delay or cancel flights during IT systems outages, hospitals do not have the luxury of postponing emergencies. The recent CrowdStrike outage that impacted Microsoft users highlighted the dependency hospitals have on their Electronic Medical Records (EMR) solutions to help them provide the right care for the right situation. The ability to access patient information is crucial for making informed clinical decisions and ensuring patient safety. Unfortunately, many were caught short in the recent outage. Luckily, some of those impacted organizations had shared care record systems that could be used as a perfectly viable alternative when their EMR solution failed. 

Will it happen again? 

What we do know is that there will be a next time – whether it’s another global IT bug, increasing ransomware attacks or a local natural disaster. Around 350-500 natural disasters occur every year alone, according to World Population Review. In the first half of 2023 alone, there was a 50% increase in ransomware attacks compared to the previous year, resulting in more than 5,000 recorded victims globally (Cloudwards) (AAG-IT). IT systems outages are, unfortunately, a “when” not “if” scenario. 

The Importance of Business Continuity in Healthcare 

Hospitals, which rely heavily on continuous access to patient data, have been shown to be particularly vulnerable to outages. At Kaiser Permanente San Jose Medical Center for example, critical systems like their EMR and central monitoring for newborns went offline recently, forcing staff to revert to manual processes and heightened security measures to ensure patient safety. This incident highlighted the vulnerability of healthcare systems that are heavily reliant on specific software and operating systems (Health News Florida) (VPM). 

The financial impact of the recent CrowdStrike outage on the healthcare sector was substantial, with estimated costs reaching $1.9 billion globally. This underscores the critical need for robust business continuity solutions and redundancy to maintain clinical operations during such outages (Becker’s Hospital Review) .  

Business Continuity Plans – Your emergency team’s emergency guide 

A Business Continuity Plan (BCP) is a strategic framework designed to help organizations prepare for, respond to, and recover from disruptive events such as outages. In the healthcare sector, a BCP is critical for ensuring patient safety and uninterrupted care.  

Globally, we have seen that during outages, hospitals that had robust BCPs in place could switch to manual processes and in some cases even alternative technical systems to continue providing care. Health Information Exchanges are an alternative system that allows many healthcare providers to access vital patient information, even when primary systems are down  (Health News Florida) (VPM).  

The Back Up System You Never Knew You Already Had 

Many governments and private hospitals use a Health Information Exchange solution to create a single view of a patient’s medical history. These solutions bring together patient data across disparate sources and systems and their technology architecture is typically completely independent of the source data systems. This independence makes them ideal business continuity systems and would allow healthcare providers to continue accessing vital patient data, ensuring uninterrupted care despite the broader system failures. 

This separation and reliability are often overlooked benefits of shared care records, enhancing the ability to deliver personalized treatment and reducing clinical risk during IT disruptions to the healthcare providers primary system.  

Planning for Your Next Emergency  

Any major outage reinforces the importance of business continuity in healthcare, and the role shared care records can play in a systems outage. By leveraging these independent systems, hospitals can help ensure continuous, high-quality care even in the face of an unforeseen technical disruption. The key is to ensure that hospital staff are aware of these benefits and have a plan to switch over to their health information exchanges when their primary systems fail. Â