April 01, 2026
Clinical Care Resilience: Ensuring Healthcare Business Continuity When IT Fails
As cyberattacks and outages grow more frequent, healthcare organizations must move beyond IT recovery planning to build clinical and operational readiness that protects patients and sustains care delivery.
Unscheduled IT outages are no longer rare events; they’re expected risks with serious consequences for patient safety, clinician performance and financial stability. To manage those risks, a growing number of healthcare organizations are working to build clinical care resilience to ensure they can continue to deliver care safely during an outage.
Clinicians who lose access to electronic health records and other technological resources experience a disruption in critical capabilities upon which they have come to rely. These issues multiply when teams haven’t rehearsed manual processes or are unsure what to expect when systems go down, especially for extended periods of time. Organizations must assess clinical workflows to understand the impact of various outage scenarios, develop remediation plans and practice them to build organizational readiness.
Clinical care resilience is an operational, clinical and cultural imperative that extends beyond IT. With the proper preparation, healthcare organizations can proactively enhance their resilience, which enables them to deliver better outcomes for patients and clinicians.
CDW can help your organization improve its resilience and ensure that patients get the care they need.
Unscheduled IT outages are no longer rare events; they’re expected risks with serious consequences for patient safety, clinician performance and financial stability. To manage those risks, a growing number of healthcare organizations are working to build clinical care resilience to ensure they can continue to deliver care safely during an outage.
Clinicians who lose access to electronic health records and other technological resources experience a disruption in critical capabilities upon which they have come to rely. These issues multiply when teams haven’t rehearsed manual processes or are unsure what to expect when systems go down, especially for extended periods of time. Organizations must assess clinical workflows to understand the impact of various outage scenarios, develop remediation plans and practice them to build organizational readiness.
Clinical care resilience is an operational, clinical and cultural imperative that extends beyond IT. With the proper preparation, healthcare organizations can proactively enhance their resilience, which enables them to deliver better outcomes for patients and clinicians.
CDW can help your organization improve its resilience and ensure that patients get the care they need.
Achieving clinical care resilience demands a mindset shift: Resilience is not about preventing failure but rather enabling clinicians to deliver care safely and confidently when failure occurs. Healthcare organizations face escalating cyberthreats, third-party outages, cloud dependency and system fragmentation — each capable of disrupting care at critical moments. In a recent survey, 72% of healthcare organizations that experienced a cyberattack reported patient care disruptions. Clinical care resilience is both an operational and ethical imperative.
The threat landscape has intensified sharply. Health-ISAC tracked 575 breaches of health sector organizations in 2025, up from 179 in 2021. Ransomware is now an expected risk, with outages tending to be intentional, widespread and prolonged. In addition, most organizations depend on cloud-based solutions, from core infrastructure to electronic health records (EHRs), creating vulnerabilities that providers cannot manage directly. All such events affect organizations in ways that leaders often don’t anticipate, with consequences spanning patient safety, clinician readiness and financial stability.
To deliver care during an outage, organizations must address the disconnect between how care is designed (highly integrated and digitally automated) and how it must be delivered during failure (manually, episodically and with limited information). Clinicians who lose EHR access also lose automation, institutional memory and built-in safety guardrails. Teams that are unfamiliar with alternative workflows and clinical downtime procedures will face heightened stress, slower processes and greater patient risk. To prevent these outcomes, organizations must assess clinical workflows to understand the impact of various outage scenarios, develop remediation plans and practice them to build organizational readiness.
Clinical care resilience extends beyond traditional disaster recovery and well beyond IT. It is operational, clinical and cultural. With strong executive leadership and cross-functional coordination, healthcare organizations can move from reactive survival to proactive resilience, improving outcomes for both patients and clinicians.
190
The number of ransomware attacks against U.S. health sector organizations in Q4 2025
Source: Health-ISAC, “Health Sector Heartbeat, Q4 2025: Cybersecurity Trends and Threats in the Health Sector,” January 2026
Merely surviving isn’t enough. CDW can help your organization build the resilience needed to support patients and clinicians.
Achieving clinical care resilience demands a mindset shift: Resilience is not about preventing failure but rather enabling clinicians to deliver care safely and confidently when failure occurs. Healthcare organizations face escalating cyberthreats, third-party outages, cloud dependency and system fragmentation — each capable of disrupting care at critical moments. In a recent survey, 72% of healthcare organizations that experienced a cyberattack reported patient care disruptions. Clinical care resilience is both an operational and ethical imperative.
The threat landscape has intensified sharply. Health-ISAC tracked 575 breaches of health sector organizations in 2025, up from 179 in 2021. Ransomware is now an expected risk, with outages tending to be intentional, widespread and prolonged. In addition, most organizations depend on cloud-based solutions, from core infrastructure to electronic health records (EHRs), creating vulnerabilities that providers cannot manage directly. All such events affect organizations in ways that leaders often don’t anticipate, with consequences spanning patient safety, clinician readiness and financial stability.
To deliver care during an outage, organizations must address the disconnect between how care is designed (highly integrated and digitally automated) and how it must be delivered during failure (manually, episodically and with limited information). Clinicians who lose EHR access also lose automation, institutional memory and built-in safety guardrails. Teams that are unfamiliar with alternative workflows and clinical downtime procedures will face heightened stress, slower processes and greater patient risk. To prevent these outcomes, organizations must assess clinical workflows to understand the impact of various outage scenarios, develop remediation plans and practice them to build organizational readiness.
Clinical care resilience extends beyond traditional disaster recovery and well beyond IT. It is operational, clinical and cultural. With strong executive leadership and cross-functional coordination, healthcare organizations can move from reactive survival to proactive resilience, improving outcomes for both patients and clinicians.
Merely surviving isn’t enough. CDW can help your organization build the resilience needed to support patients and clinicians.
Care Resilience by the Numbers
54%
The percentage of healthcare organizations that reported increased complications from medical procedures because of a cyberattack
Source: Proofpoint, “The 2025 Study on Cyber Insecurity in Healthcare,” October 2025
29%
The percentage of healthcare organizations that reported an increase in patient mortality rates because of a cyberattack
Source: Proofpoint, “The 2025 Study on Cyber Insecurity in Healthcare,” October 2025
46%
The percentage of healthcare organizations that have disaster recovery and infrastructure resilience practices in place
Source: College of Healthcare Information Management Executives, “National Trends Report 2025,” November 2025
Care Resilience by the Numbers
54%
The percentage of healthcare organizations that reported increased complications from medical procedures because of a cyberattack
Source: Proofpoint, “The 2025 Study on Cyber Insecurity in Healthcare,” October 2025
29%
The percentage of healthcare organizations that reported an increase in patient mortality rates because of a cyberattack
Source: Proofpoint, “The 2025 Study on Cyber Insecurity in Healthcare,” October 2025
46%
The percentage of healthcare organizations that have disaster recovery and infrastructure resilience practices in place
Source: College of Healthcare Information Management Executives, “National Trends Report 2025,” November 2025
- CLINICIAN- AND PATIENT-CENTERED RESILIENCE
- BUILDING HEALTHCARE BUSINESS CONTINUITY
- ACHIEVING CLINICAL RESILIENCE
When healthcare providers lack clinical resilience, outages have ripple effects across the organization. Patients experience delays, uncertainty, and the risk of lower-quality care and poorer outcomes. Clinicians’ work is stressful, confusing and poorly coordinated. Costs rise as organizations lose revenue and revert to slower, more expensive manual processes.
CLINICAL RESILIENCE: Clinical care resilience differs from traditional IT resilience, which focuses on systems uptime, redundancy and recovery speed. It is also distinct from disaster recovery, which prioritizes the ability to restore systems quickly and smoothly. Clinical resilience ensures that disruptions are manageable by enabling care delivery during an outage.
WHEN SYSTEMS FAIL: Technology typically supports care through automation and information retention. In an outage, tools that have become central to clinical workflows may suddenly be unavailable. Without EHRs, communication platforms or clinical decision support, clinicians must revert to manual workflows that many have never practiced. Stress increases, handoffs degrade and risks multiply.
TRAINING FOR OUTAGES: Providers must prepare employees through simulations and cross-department drills that establish or refresh manual workflows and identify resources that teams would need in various outage scenarios. This is crucial for building the confidence, familiarity and muscle memory that allows employees to function under pressure so they can deliver care safely.
PATIENT SAFETY RISKS: Cyber incidents and outages can disrupt clinical workflows in ways that affect patient safety if providers are unprepared. For example, many hospitals have adopted technology tools to reduce medication errors, manage fall risks and surface critical alerts by analyzing patient telemetry, while EHR access plays a critical role in decision-making.
OPERATIONAL COSTS: Downtime and outages have a significant operational impact. Ransomware attacks can be far more expensive and take longer to resolve than leaders may realize, with one study estimating that healthcare organizations lost $1.9 million per day and had 17 days of downtime, on average, after an attack.
Click Below To Continue Reading
A ransomware attack on a major claims clearinghouse in 2024 sent shockwaves through the entire healthcare sector, with 74% of hospitals reporting patient care impacts, such as delayed authorizations for medically necessary treatments, and 33% reporting a disruption of more than half of their revenue. Nearly all reported a financial impact, including the high administrative expense of reverting to manual processes.
In 2024, a ransomware attack against a Midwestern hospital exposed sensitive information belonging to nearly 800,000 patients and took the EHR system and patient portal offline for nearly four months. Subsequent impacts included a class-action lawsuit and the time-consuming process of transferring patient data recorded manually into the restored EHR.
In May 2025, a ransomware attack led to a data breach and a shutdown of data systems across a New England provider’s entire network. That same month, an attack disrupted operations at a Midwestern system’s 14 medical centers as well as its call center. In the latter incident, nurses described serious risks to patient safety as a result of providing care without EHRs and the usual safety guardrails, such as pharmacy cross-checks.
Three trends have shifted the landscape for healthcare organizations and should inform clinical care resilience planning. First is the role of malicious intent among bad actors. Today, they engage in advanced, sustained efforts to bring hospitals down intentionally, primarily for financial gain. Leaders must strengthen their defenses while recognizing that no organization is impenetrable.
Second is the shift from on-premises infrastructure to cloud-based solutions. When data centers were almost exclusively on-premises, CIOs and IT leaders had more control over their infrastructure and systems. Now, those resources may reside on a public cloud or be manufacturer-hosted. Organizations’ dependence on third parties means they have much less control and ownership of technology than they used to.
Finally, modern healthcare organizations rely heavily on partners for critical services ranging from revenue and billing to cybersecurity. Individually, these services may have a small footprint from an operational perspective. But when services are suddenly unavailable, that can have a massive impact on organizations’ ability to accomplish critical tasks related to care.
CLEAR OWNERSHIP: Clinical care resilience is not a technology issue but rather a discipline that spans clinical, operational and cultural domains. Yet many organizations default to assigning responsibility to IT departments even though these teams don’t deliver care. Others assume that “everyone” owns this capability, which in practice means that no one truly leads.
Responsibility should sit with top executives, such as CEOs and similar roles. From there, resilience planning and capability building require shared ownership and explicit governance across leadership, with clinicians actively involved in planning and testing. The latter’s input is essential to ensure that resilience strategies effectively mitigate the impact of an outage on clinicians and patients.
RESILIENCE ASSESSMENT: Clinical and operational teams need to understand at a granular level how a worst-case scenario would affect standard workflows. For example, a ransomware attack could disable access to picture archiving and communication systems (PACS); radio-frequency ID tracking systems, which are used to guard against infant abductions; and pneumatic tubes that transport medications. If an EHR provider does go down, that may affect multiple hospitals in a region, eliminating the option of sending patients to a nearby location.
A resilience assessment helps organizations understand how full or partial technology outages would affect clinical care delivery and informs recommendations to develop alternative processes. With specialized expertise and extensive experience in healthcare, CDW’s experts can conduct detailed analyses of clinical and business areas and recommend actionable steps to increase resilience.
REMEDIATION PLANNING: CDW’s remediation services help organizations build downtime workflows, create the materials their teams will need and train them so they are confident and prepared to operate. Remediation planning addresses issues such as how long organizations can continue to provide care with zero technology and which systems need to be restored first.
CDW also helps organizations identify gaps in resilience, manage vulnerabilities and develop plans that reflect how employees perform certain tasks, how they make decisions, what the technology stack looks like and how the organization can minimize gaps through strategic investments. For example, if teams need to shift to a backup resource in a hybrid cloud environment, they must know how to do so quickly.
PRACTICE SIMULATIONS: A common misstep is testing resilience plans infrequently or only after an incident. More than one-third of healthcare organizations test disaster recovery and incident response plans annually, a cadence that is insufficient to prepare teams for the realities of an outage.
CDW runs downtime scenarios to ensure teams know what to do when systems go down. For example, clinicians must know where to access process manuals and paper forms and how they will manage alternative processes, such as assigning a security guard to the maternity ward if the abduction alert system is inoperable. CDW simulates various types of outages — for example, a lab out of commission or an emergency department without technology — and shadows clinicians to develop detailed, sustainable workflows.
ONGOING REFINEMENT: Without building a clear path to resilience, leaders may assume that extended downtime is impossible to overcome and thus be reluctant to invest resources for that scenario. Another common assumption is that if one system fails, every system fails. In reality, fragmented downtime happens frequently and can be harder to overcome.
Building and maintaining clinical care resilience is a process, not a one-time exercise. As organizations build out their resilience capabilities, they must understand that this requires continuous readiness. Changes in technologies, workflows and staffing make it essential that organizations provide regular opportunities to refine and practice resilience. To that end, post-simulation debriefs are valuable opportunities to update plans to capture any gaps, vulnerabilities and insights that run-throughs revealed.
Technology dependencies and other challenges add complexity to clinical care resilience. An expert partner can help organizations take a systematic, strategic approach.
INCREASING CYBERTHREATS: Escalating cyberthreats have raised the stakes for healthcare organizations, with attacks that are increasingly sophisticated, frequent and intended to disrupt care delivery. Regulatory and compliance imperatives also add pressure. Strict requirements for patient data protection and continuity planning add complexity and urgency to resilience initiatives.
Internally, organizations are expanding their deployment of artificial intelligence and automation. While AI offers efficiency and relief for clinicians, organizations must implement these tools cautiously to ensure safety and reliability. Organizations must deploy new tools with an eye toward resilience to ensure these support clinical workflows rather than introduce potential points of failure. CDW can help organizations address cybersecurity risks and develop strategic plans to deploy emerging technologies safely.
TECHNOLOGY DEPENDENCIES: Providers have transformed care delivery systems in recent years, leveraging the benefits of technology but also increasing their dependence on it. Modern care relies on automation and digital “memory,” capturing and retrieving data to support EHRs, decision-making and communication. When systems fail, clinicians lose access to processes and information they depend on.
Many organizations also rely on third-party and cloud-based platforms over which they have little control. Most organizations have hybrid infrastructure, with only 7% operating fully on-premises. Software as a Service vendors, hosted EHRs and cloud infrastructure introduce systemic risk: If one major partner goes down, all of its customers are affected. Resilience planning must account for these risks and recognize that redundancy alone is no longer sufficient.
SYSTEMS COMPLEXITY: IT and clinical teams need integrated, layered defense tools and automation to manage security efficiently and effectively. However, layered security and resilience management are complex. While an integrated approach ensures safer care delivery, minimizes disruption and strengthens long-term operational readiness, many organizations struggle to integrate prevention, recovery, business continuity, automation and compliance into a unified strategy.
CDW’s strategic consulting resources include healthcare strategists, solution architects and transformation centers that can guide organizations in aligning technology investments with clinical continuity goals. From ensuring the right security solutions are in place to enabling rapid recovery and clinical resilience capabilities, CDW’s approach helps organizations maintain care continuity with strategies tailored for each unique environment.
INSUFFICIENT DOWNTIME PLANNING: Many organizations have plans on paper but lack real-world drills for operating without technology systems. Simulated outages are essential given clinicians’ reliance on digital recordkeeping and automated workflows. For example, clinicians submitting medication orders normally rely on automatic contraindication flags as a safety measure; in an outage, they must be practiced in manual processes for managing risks.
Simulations ensure that teams know what to do and can shift easily into that mode. Teams should follow these rehearsals with debriefs to identify what went well, what they can improve on and which areas to focus on during the next drill. Planning and rehearsal build confidence that teams can meet the challenge and continue to deliver patient care safely and smoothly.
- CLINICIAN- AND PATIENT-CENTERED RESILIENCE
- BUILDING HEALTHCARE BUSINESS CONTINUITY
- ACHIEVING CLINICAL RESILIENCE
When healthcare providers lack clinical resilience, outages have ripple effects across the organization. Patients experience delays, uncertainty, and the risk of lower-quality care and poorer outcomes. Clinicians’ work is stressful, confusing and poorly coordinated. Costs rise as organizations lose revenue and revert to slower, more expensive manual processes.
CLINICAL RESILIENCE: Clinical care resilience differs from traditional IT resilience, which focuses on systems uptime, redundancy and recovery speed. It is also distinct from disaster recovery, which prioritizes the ability to restore systems quickly and smoothly. Clinical resilience ensures that disruptions are manageable by enabling care delivery during an outage.
WHEN SYSTEMS FAIL: Technology typically supports care through automation and information retention. In an outage, tools that have become central to clinical workflows may suddenly be unavailable. Without EHRs, communication platforms or clinical decision support, clinicians must revert to manual workflows that many have never practiced. Stress increases, handoffs degrade and risks multiply.
TRAINING FOR OUTAGES: Providers must prepare employees through simulations and cross-department drills that establish or refresh manual workflows and identify resources that teams would need in various outage scenarios. This is crucial for building the confidence, familiarity and muscle memory that allows employees to function under pressure so they can deliver care safely.
PATIENT SAFETY RISKS: Cyber incidents and outages can disrupt clinical workflows in ways that affect patient safety if providers are unprepared. For example, many hospitals have adopted technology tools to reduce medication errors, manage fall risks and surface critical alerts by analyzing patient telemetry, while EHR access plays a critical role in decision-making.
OPERATIONAL COSTS: Downtime and outages have a significant operational impact. Ransomware attacks can be far more expensive and take longer to resolve than leaders may realize, with one study estimating that healthcare organizations lost $1.9 million per day and had 17 days of downtime, on average, after an attack.
Click Below To Continue Reading
A ransomware attack on a major claims clearinghouse in 2024 sent shockwaves through the entire healthcare sector, with 74% of hospitals reporting patient care impacts, such as delayed authorizations for medically necessary treatments, and 33% reporting a disruption of more than half of their revenue. Nearly all reported a financial impact, including the high administrative expense of reverting to manual processes.
In 2024, a ransomware attack against a Midwestern hospital exposed sensitive information belonging to nearly 800,000 patients and took the EHR system and patient portal offline for nearly four months. Subsequent impacts included a class-action lawsuit and the time-consuming process of transferring patient data recorded manually into the restored EHR.
In May 2025, a ransomware attack led to a data breach and a shutdown of data systems across a New England provider’s entire network. That same month, an attack disrupted operations at a Midwestern system’s 14 medical centers as well as its call center. In the latter incident, nurses described serious risks to patient safety as a result of providing care without EHRs and the usual safety guardrails, such as pharmacy cross-checks.
Three trends have shifted the landscape for healthcare organizations and should inform clinical care resilience planning. First is the role of malicious intent among bad actors. Today, they engage in advanced, sustained efforts to bring hospitals down intentionally, primarily for financial gain. Leaders must strengthen their defenses while recognizing that no organization is impenetrable.
Second is the shift from on-premises infrastructure to cloud-based solutions. When data centers were almost exclusively on-premises, CIOs and IT leaders had more control over their infrastructure and systems. Now, those resources may reside on a public cloud or be manufacturer-hosted. Organizations’ dependence on third parties means they have much less control and ownership of technology than they used to.
Finally, modern healthcare organizations rely heavily on partners for critical services ranging from revenue and billing to cybersecurity. Individually, these services may have a small footprint from an operational perspective. But when services are suddenly unavailable, that can have a massive impact on organizations’ ability to accomplish critical tasks related to care.
CLEAR OWNERSHIP: Clinical care resilience is not a technology issue but rather a discipline that spans clinical, operational and cultural domains. Yet many organizations default to assigning responsibility to IT departments even though these teams don’t deliver care. Others assume that “everyone” owns this capability, which in practice means that no one truly leads.
Responsibility should sit with top executives, such as CEOs and similar roles. From there, resilience planning and capability building require shared ownership and explicit governance across leadership, with clinicians actively involved in planning and testing. The latter’s input is essential to ensure that resilience strategies effectively mitigate the impact of an outage on clinicians and patients.
RESILIENCE ASSESSMENT: Clinical and operational teams need to understand at a granular level how a worst-case scenario would affect standard workflows. For example, a ransomware attack could disable access to picture archiving and communication systems (PACS); radio-frequency ID tracking systems, which are used to guard against infant abductions; and pneumatic tubes that transport medications. If an EHR provider does go down, that may affect multiple hospitals in a region, eliminating the option of sending patients to a nearby location.
A resilience assessment helps organizations understand how full or partial technology outages would affect clinical care delivery and informs recommendations to develop alternative processes. With specialized expertise and extensive experience in healthcare, CDW’s experts can conduct detailed analyses of clinical and business areas and recommend actionable steps to increase resilience.
REMEDIATION PLANNING: CDW’s remediation services help organizations build downtime workflows, create the materials their teams will need and train them so they are confident and prepared to operate. Remediation planning addresses issues such as how long organizations can continue to provide care with zero technology and which systems need to be restored first.
CDW also helps organizations identify gaps in resilience, manage vulnerabilities and develop plans that reflect how employees perform certain tasks, how they make decisions, what the technology stack looks like and how the organization can minimize gaps through strategic investments. For example, if teams need to shift to a backup resource in a hybrid cloud environment, they must know how to do so quickly.
PRACTICE SIMULATIONS: A common misstep is testing resilience plans infrequently or only after an incident. More than one-third of healthcare organizations test disaster recovery and incident response plans annually, a cadence that is insufficient to prepare teams for the realities of an outage.
CDW runs downtime scenarios to ensure teams know what to do when systems go down. For example, clinicians must know where to access process manuals and paper forms and how they will manage alternative processes, such as assigning a security guard to the maternity ward if the abduction alert system is inoperable. CDW simulates various types of outages — for example, a lab out of commission or an emergency department without technology — and shadows clinicians to develop detailed, sustainable workflows.
ONGOING REFINEMENT: Without building a clear path to resilience, leaders may assume that extended downtime is impossible to overcome and thus be reluctant to invest resources for that scenario. Another common assumption is that if one system fails, every system fails. In reality, fragmented downtime happens frequently and can be harder to overcome.
Building and maintaining clinical care resilience is a process, not a one-time exercise. As organizations build out their resilience capabilities, they must understand that this requires continuous readiness. Changes in technologies, workflows and staffing make it essential that organizations provide regular opportunities to refine and practice resilience. To that end, post-simulation debriefs are valuable opportunities to update plans to capture any gaps, vulnerabilities and insights that run-throughs revealed.
Technology dependencies and other challenges add complexity to clinical care resilience. An expert partner can help organizations take a systematic, strategic approach.
INCREASING CYBERTHREATS: Escalating cyberthreats have raised the stakes for healthcare organizations, with attacks that are increasingly sophisticated, frequent and intended to disrupt care delivery. Regulatory and compliance imperatives also add pressure. Strict requirements for patient data protection and continuity planning add complexity and urgency to resilience initiatives.
Internally, organizations are expanding their deployment of artificial intelligence and automation. While AI offers efficiency and relief for clinicians, organizations must implement these tools cautiously to ensure safety and reliability. Organizations must deploy new tools with an eye toward resilience to ensure these support clinical workflows rather than introduce potential points of failure. CDW can help organizations address cybersecurity risks and develop strategic plans to deploy emerging technologies safely.
TECHNOLOGY DEPENDENCIES: Providers have transformed care delivery systems in recent years, leveraging the benefits of technology but also increasing their dependence on it. Modern care relies on automation and digital “memory,” capturing and retrieving data to support EHRs, decision-making and communication. When systems fail, clinicians lose access to processes and information they depend on.
Many organizations also rely on third-party and cloud-based platforms over which they have little control. Most organizations have hybrid infrastructure, with only 7% operating fully on-premises. Software as a Service vendors, hosted EHRs and cloud infrastructure introduce systemic risk: If one major partner goes down, all of its customers are affected. Resilience planning must account for these risks and recognize that redundancy alone is no longer sufficient.
SYSTEMS COMPLEXITY: IT and clinical teams need integrated, layered defense tools and automation to manage security efficiently and effectively. However, layered security and resilience management are complex. While an integrated approach ensures safer care delivery, minimizes disruption and strengthens long-term operational readiness, many organizations struggle to integrate prevention, recovery, business continuity, automation and compliance into a unified strategy.
CDW’s strategic consulting resources include healthcare strategists, solution architects and transformation centers that can guide organizations in aligning technology investments with clinical continuity goals. From ensuring the right security solutions are in place to enabling rapid recovery and clinical resilience capabilities, CDW’s approach helps organizations maintain care continuity with strategies tailored for each unique environment.
INSUFFICIENT DOWNTIME PLANNING: Many organizations have plans on paper but lack real-world drills for operating without technology systems. Simulated outages are essential given clinicians’ reliance on digital recordkeeping and automated workflows. For example, clinicians submitting medication orders normally rely on automatic contraindication flags as a safety measure; in an outage, they must be practiced in manual processes for managing risks.
Simulations ensure that teams know what to do and can shift easily into that mode. Teams should follow these rehearsals with debriefs to identify what went well, what they can improve on and which areas to focus on during the next drill. Planning and rehearsal build confidence that teams can meet the challenge and continue to deliver patient care safely and smoothly.
CDW can help healthcare organizations build clinical resilience to support clinicians and protect patient care during an outage.
Eli Tarlow
CDW Expert
