In an era where digital infrastructure is the backbone of modern healthcare, the recent CrowdStrike outage has served as a stark reminder of the vulnerabilities and challenges that come with reliance on networked systems. For healthcare providers, this event underscores the critical importance of having robust backup systems in place — immediately available on non-compromised mobile devices — to maintain continuity of care when electronic health records (EHR) go down or networks are compromised.
The impact of the CrowdStrike outage
As you likely are aware, CrowdStrike, a leading cybersecurity firm, recently experienced a significant outage that affected numerous clients globally. The disruption had far-reaching consequences, as many organizations rely on CrowdStrike’s services to protect their systems from cyber threats. For healthcare providers, the implications were particularly severe:
- Security disruption: The outage incapacitated critical cybersecurity defenses, leaving healthcare systems vulnerable to cyber attacks and unable to detect or respond to potential threats effectively. This posed a substantial risk to patient data security and overall system integrity.
- System interruptions: With cybersecurity measures offline, many healthcare providers faced disruptions in their EHR systems, leading to delays in accessing patient records, processing medical orders, and performing essential administrative tasks.
- Increased patient risks: With many systems rendered unavailable, the risks in caring for patients increased exponentially. Lack of a patient’s history, medications, as well as increased time for lab results — not to mention communication challenges throughout the organization — this is a recipe for bad outcomes.
The case for operational resilience in healthcare
In light of the profound impact of the CrowdStrike outage, amongst many other recent events, it is important for healthcare providers to implement comprehensive failover systems, tools, and procedures to ensure operational resilience. Here’s why:
- Ensuring continuity of care: Healthcare providers must have failover tools and systems to maintain immediate and seamless access to patient records and other functionality required to offer essential clinical services during outages. Platform- and operating-system-agnostic systems like Agathos Continuity help health systems immediately contact patients, manage their schedules, and coordinate their care. This ensures patient safety during active care episodes, reduces patient leakage, and mitigates the financial impact of these challenging events.
- Mitigating risks: Immediately-available failover systems provide an additional layer of protection against cyber threats. In the event of a primary system failure, this new generation of backups can increase the speed and efficiency of crossing over — which, apart from direct clinical benefits, can more quickly mitigate the risk of further data breaches and maintain operational integrity.
- Enhancing patient safety: Patient safety is paramount. Having immediate critical medical information via a mobile device is a critical piece of the failover equation. For example, Agathos Continuity provides immediate and seamless access to the patient record and past medications on any mobile device.
- Regulatory compliance: Healthcare providers are subject to stringent regulatory requirements regarding data security and patient privacy. Backup systems help ensure compliance with these regulations through the most longstanding and intractable of ransomware events by maintaining data availability and, in the margin, system integrity through the downtime period.
- Building trust: Reliable backup processes and systems that actually work in preserving care continuity build trust among patients and caregivers, partly by the events being minimally noticed, and increasingly as communities are attuned to the wide spectrum of how these events have been handled. Crises need not go to waste when providers demonstrate a commitment to uninterrupted and high-quality care, even in the face of technical challenges.
Implementing a robust operational resilience strategy
To effectively implement a failsafe strategy for operationally weathering cyber threat events, healthcare providers should consider the following steps:
- Invest in redundant systems: Utilize redundant servers, databases, and network infrastructure to ensure that there is no single point of failure. Supporting mobile access offers new levels of resilience when networks and computers are down (or need to be taken offline following a perceived threat).
- Regular testing and drills: Conduct regular testing of backup tools, systems, and emergency protocols to ensure usability and staff readiness in the event of an outage.
- Employee training: Train staff on downtime procedures and the use of backup systems to ensure smooth transitions during outages.
Conclusion
The recent CrowdStrike outage showed us the fragility of digital infrastructure and the critical need for more resilient backup systems in healthcare. Investing in comprehensive failover solutions can offer immediate and usable access (ideally via mobile devices) to critical functionality. Thereby healthcare providers can ensure continuous and high-quality care, best protect patient data, and enhance overall system resilience. As technology continues to evolve, so too must strategies for not just safeguarding yet also accessing the vital information and functions upon healthcare providers rely.
To learn more about how Agathos can support care resilience in these scenarios, please contact us.
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