And so it begins…
The 2024 hurricane season kicked off with a bang! Like most of you, what I had planned for the week of July 8 was literally blown away by Hurricane Beryl.
That Monday, when the storm barreled through, I witnessed firsthand at HMH everyone stepping up to do whatever needed to be done so we could care for our patients. I saw many of you working long, exhausting hours; often in roles you don’t normally do. Our community hospitals had the additional challenges of lost power and then network services, making using critical applications, like Epic, challenging or even undoable. As a result, many of you experienced your first extended downtime.
One of the best ways to accomplish this is to ensure we have standard Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (SOGI) questions completed as a part of each patient’s medical record. These key questions are already embedded within Epic, through MyChart (for eCheck-in), registration demographic screens and a SOGI form accessible by clinicians from Storyboard. (Click here for a tip sheet that covers these questions).
Not surprisingly, all of you quickly adapted to the hurricane and its wake, prioritizing our patients and the community. Your fortitude, focus and resilience helped us come out of this stronger.
Being on the other side of this storm allows us to find value in the lessons learned. In hindsight, the experience has exposed many areas of opportunities as we prepare for similar downtime events in the future. It didn’t take long for us to be tested again when less than two weeks after Beryl, on Friday, July 19, many organizations across various industries worldwide, including health care, were impacted by the CrowdStrike update that grounded planes and froze systems that we normally take for granted.
So, what’s next?
Informatics and IT teams are partnering with operations to compile our lessons learned from the communication and clinical systems downtimes we experienced, then prioritize next steps. We’ll use this event as an opportunity to improve going forward.
Below is a list of the broad categories of feedback we’ve accumulated:
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Consistent communication channels, especially with network/Wi-Fi outages.
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Disaster/downtime roles clearly defined.
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Understanding the impact of network outages on devices and services.
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Education for downtime processes and documentation.
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Updating of downtime and recovery processes, including a partial outage scenario.
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Downtime form and reports standardization, updates and availability.
