Rebooting healthcare information technology downtime management

Healthcare, like many other industries, has become reliant on technology to manage daily operations. Often, technology downtimes are managed within the information technology departments to ensure the technical staff can return the hardware or software to the end users as quickly as possible. However, if managed strictly through IT departments, such incidents lack critical communication components and an understanding of the impact on end users. This paper argues that such technological incidents need to be managed not just rapidly but also in conjunction with the emergency preparedness department. It presents the example of a healthcare system from the US Midwest where the IT department has worked closely with the emergency preparedness department to design a major incident management system that closely resembles the hospital incident command structure. The development and implementation of this process has improved several metrics, including time to declare (declaration of an incident) and mean time to restore (returning the technology back to the end users). This paper will describe how this collaboration between information technology and emergency preparedness has improved the impact on healthcare operations, and will highlight the metrics used to monitor success.