It was hard to escape. Whether or not it directly affected you, the CrowdStrike outage on July 19, 2024, was everywhere. And it makes sense why: It’s considered the largest IT outage in history. A faulty patch released by the company, whose focus is preventing cyberthreats, caused Microsoft users to experience disrupted—and even halted—service. Airline customers and banking patrons were hit hard by this update error, and along with those critical industries, many healthcare organizations were forced to deliver care without their electronic health records (EHRs) and other necessary technology platforms.
The outage might have only lasted 90 minutes, but the recovery for the nearly 8.5 million affected systems was long and arduous. The setbacks were not quick to be remediated, either. Aside from the major inconveniences this outage caused, not to mention the exorbitant cost (and I am not downplaying either of these harsh realities), two things were made particularly clear for the healthcare sector during this ordeal: 1) All healthcare organizations deliver care with a predicated reliance on technology. 2) Planned or unplanned outages (as well as nefarious cyberattacks) will absolutely occur within said technology.
There’s no reason to point fingers about outages, and without belaboring this specific worldwide and historic outage, I think this is a good time to dial into why it is imperative for healthcare organizations to ensure their daily patient-care operations don’t have to be taken down due to these errors, outages, attacks and other unforeseen circumstances. For all intents and purposes, patients do not—and should not—care about why these downtimes occur. They need undivided care.
Systems up: Business continuity answers the call
Downtime can have severe implications on the healthcare world. For patients, these outages can affect medication administration, disrupt transfers of care and stall other key clinical communications.
Many hospitals have business continuity plans for such events, but deploying these strategies is another story. Having a strong partnership with healthcare IT vendors can eliminate the potential problems that became a reality for so many healthcare organizations.
It isn’t a matter of “if” these outages will occur, whether planned or spurred by a cyber event, but what organizations can do “when” they occur. Given this, Altera Digital Health devised and deployed a comprehensive solution that can effectively help protect against the issues often caused during downtimes. Our Business Continuity Solution, offered through our Altera Managed Services business unit, provides uninterrupted electronic access to patient medical records so medical facilities can continue to provide quality patient care and operate more efficiently in the event of EHR or network downtime. A tactical solution, it offers users across the hospital read-only access to critical patient data from the EHR, regardless of the reason for—or duration of—the downtime.
This isn’t a safety net as much as it is an extension of the solutions health IT organizations use every day.
The practicality of continuity
During the CrowdStrike outage, Altera—along with most other health IT vendors—had clients left without network service for their EHRs and other health IT software. But we are proud that many of our clients were able to access their clinical data instantly during the outage thanks to our Business Continuity solution.
One such client, who serves more than 1 million outpatient visits and more than 100,000 emergency room visits annually, relied on Altera’s Business Continuity Solution so that this massive global disruption amounted to a minor blip.
The Business Continuity Solution, specifically the Downtime Viewer module, provided this organization’s staff members with a holistic and accurate picture of every patient’s data—from the beginning of and throughout the CrowdStrike event. Once staff members were able to get into their PCs, they were able to see orders, results and documents, and treat their patients as if it was just like any other day. Excellent patient care was prioritized and accomplished, and while the outage might have further complicated this, Altera Managed Services kept the path upward uninterrupted.
Forward progress, always
One of our main tenets at Altera is to be better today than we were yesterday, and by ensuring we have the technology solutions to not only help the daily delivery of care across disciplines, but to bridge any gaps—especially unforeseen issues—that are sure to arise. We see the summit of healthcare, and this type of service, along with many others, will help organizations everywhere get there.
Learn more about how Altera Managed Services can help your organization.