8 ways to keep seeing patients when your systems go down

The schedule is full, the first patient is already in an exam room and the EHR will not load. There is no error message and no timeline from the vendor, just a spinning icon and a front desk that has to decide what to tell the next 30 people walking through the door.

Outages stopped being exotic years ago. A faulty software update in July 2024 pulled health care networks offline across the country, an effect researchers later measured in a study published in JAMA Network Open, and ransomware, cloud migrations and clearinghouse failures have each taken practices dark since. Most groups say they are ready for it. A 2021 MGMA Stat poll found 82 percent had an EHR or practice management downtime protocol. Far fewer keep those protocols current: in an April 2024 MGMA Stat poll, only 29 percent of medical groups had updated their EHR or revenue cycle downtime procedures in the previous year.

A downtime plan is not an IT document. It is an operations document that tells the front desk, the clinical team and the billing office exactly what happens in the first 10 minutes, the rest of the day and the week after the systems come back. Here are eight places to start.