An EHR interruption can affect registration, documentation, prescribing, orders, communication, and billing. A useful EHR downtime checklist gives staff a safe way to continue essential work while technical teams identify the cause and restore service.
The plan should reflect the practice’s EHR, specialty, locations, staffing, and legal obligations. Use these twelve items as a starting framework.
1. Define What Counts as Downtime
Clarify whether the plan covers a complete vendor outage, local internet loss, workstation failure, identity problem, or degraded performance. Different causes require different responses.
2. Name the Downtime Leader
Assign authority to activate the plan, coordinate departments, contact vendors, and approve the return to normal operations.
3. Maintain Current Contact Information
Keep EHR, internet, IT, pharmacy, laboratory, imaging, clearinghouse, and leadership contacts available outside the affected system.
4. Prepare Approved Downtime Forms
Maintain controlled paper or offline forms for registration, clinical notes, orders, messages, charges, and other essential workflows.
5. Establish Patient-Identification Procedures
Downtime must not weaken identity checks. Define how employees verify patients and match documentation when normal electronic tools are unavailable.
6. Protect Medications and Clinical Communication
Clinical leaders should define approved prescribing, result, referral, and urgent-message procedures.
7. Create a Communication Plan
Decide how staff receive updates, how often, and from whom. Also define what employees may tell patients and external partners.
8. Preserve Security During Workarounds
Temporary processes still require privacy, secure storage, limited access, and controlled disposal.
9. Document Technical Troubleshooting
Record symptoms, affected sites, start time, changes, vendor case numbers, and actions taken.
10. Plan the Recovery Sequence
Identify which functions must return first and how the practice validates access, interfaces, devices, and performance.
11. Reconcile Downtime Records
Assign responsibility for entering, scanning, matching, validating, and securely storing information created during the interruption.
12. Test and Improve the Plan
Run tabletop exercises and practical tests. After an outage, document lessons, owners, and deadlines for improvement.
Prepare Before the EHR Is Unavailable
HHS contingency-planning guidance within its HIPAA Security guidance materials can help organizations evaluate recovery requirements.
Review Microwize’s managed IT services and remote IT support services. Contact Microwize to discuss the technology portion of your downtime plan.