Your electronic health record will go down at some point. The internet circuit fails, the platform has an outage, or a workstation dies mid-shift. The facilities that stay calm are the ones that decided what to do long before it happened.
Why paper alone is not a plan
Everyone says they will fall back to paper. But if nobody knows where the downtime forms are, who to call, or how charting gets reconciled afterward, that fallback creates its own risk of errors and gaps.
What a real downtime plan covers
- Clear roles: who declares downtime, who notifies staff, who contacts IT and the vendor.
- Accessible downtime documentation forms that do not live only on the system that is down.
- A known process for reconciling paper charting back into the EHR afterward.
- Redundant internet, so a single circuit failure does not take the EHR offline.
- Verified backups and a tested recovery time, so you know how long a full restore actually takes.
The best time to test your downtime plan is a quiet Tuesday, not during an actual outage. A short tabletop exercise reveals the gaps while the stakes are low.
Prevention still matters most
A plan handles the outage you cannot prevent. Proactive monitoring, redundant connectivity, and maintained hardware prevent most of the ones you can. Together they turn EHR downtime from a crisis into a manageable, rehearsed event.