Downtime for Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems and computer networks is inevitable and unavoidable, due to a variety of circumstances, including software updates, hardware failures and ransomware. Downtime may be scheduled or unscheduled, and may affect only one system, but it can also be as catastrophic as an entire network outage. Having an electronic downtime solution in place can protect your organization, ensure patient safety and boost the confidence of your team. There are many reasons why your hospital needs to implement a downtime solution, and in this blog, we highlight the six most critical reasons.
1. Ensure Patient Safety
When systems or networks are down, you lose access to critical patient information, which significantly increases the risk for errors in treatment and/or patient injury. With an electronic downtime solution, you can maintain access to patient records, and decrease or even eliminate those risks.
2. Rapid Recovery via HL7
Manual recovery after a downtime event is time consuming and costly. For every hour of downtime, there are exponentially more hours needed to recover. With an electronic downtime solution, the information captured into that solution can be electronically exported out after the downtime event ends, and into any other system via HL7, plain text or an API.
3. Avoid Errors in Patient Records
Handwritten patient records collected during a downtime event may lack critical data and are often difficult to read. Worse, paper is sometimes lost/misplaced resulting in a loss of documentation. Capture patient information electronically to accurately identify patients and access historical information. Scan other documents such as identification and insurance info, referrals and prescriptions, consent forms and treatment notes right into the downtime solution for safe-keeping.
4. Maximize Revenue
When your downtime solution is paper-based, patients’ treatment may be charted inaccurately, late, or not at all, resulting in revenue loss. Ensure that all services performed and treatment that is rendered are documented correctly and completely, ultimately allowing for precise coding and timely billing.
5. Protect Your Budget
A Gartner Study estimates that downtime comes at the cost of $5600 per minute. How do you add a line item for that to your budget, especially when you can’t possibly plan for all the downtime your organization might experience? Protect your budget by implementing an electronic downtime solution, that will ultimately help you save on the cost of downtime.
6. Maintain Schedule of Medical Procedures
A downtime event may hinder or prevent access to information that could result in having to cancel/reschedule patient procedures. Having access to that information in a downtime solution can ensure that scheduled procedures stay on track and patient care continues uninterrupted.
If these six reasons aren’t compelling enough, contact dbtech to see how your organization can reduce costs, mitigate risks and increase patient satisfaction. Download our downtime infographic to learn more or contact our team to find out how our solution at dbtech can solve your downtime woes.