Technology downtime is a healthcare crisis, not just an IT issue: Part 1

HIMSS 2025 in Las Vegas delivered big on innovation and digital transformation, but one theme rose to the top: resilience. Not the kind stored in a server rack — the kind that keeps care going when systems go down.

I led a focus group on that exact topic, and the takeaway was clear: Outages will happen. But are we truly ready to keep supporting patients when the screens go dark?

The evolution of downtime

In the past, healthcare downtime was thought of mostly as caused by human error or hardware failure. We built redundancy, ran backups and called it good.

Today the threat has changed. First, as much as you can protect against mistakes or the “what ifs,” now you must protect against malicious bad actors who are motivated to disable you. That’s a very different game. It’s warfare.

Second, as the industry moves to private cloud and manufacturer hosting as well as public cloud and SaaS-based solutions, IT leaders lose control of system availability. And this isn’t theoretical. According to The HIPAA Journal, hackers breached over 276 million healthcare records in 2024, impacting almost the entire U.S. population (81%).

These aren’t just data breaches. They stop care in its tracks and put lives at risk. That’s why true resilience — built around both workflows in absence of tech and people — has never been more urgent.

The real-world impact

As a healthcare strategist at CDW, I hear this a lot: Downtime isn’t just an IT issue. It’s a care issue. Simply put, when systems go down, patients may need to find alternative hospitals for critical care, ancillary testing and results can be delayed or completely disabled, supply chains can come to a complete halt, payroll can become nearly impossible. The list goes on.

And it’s not slowing down. Dialog Health reported that in 2024, ransomware attacks caused an average of nearly 19 days of downtime per incident across U.S. healthcare. That’s almost three weeks without the tools clinicians rely on to deliver care.

As much as we try, we can’t stop every incident. But we can plan better for what happens next. And that’s where real resilience begins.

It’s time for a new approach

In healthcare, the terms “disaster recovery” and “business continuity” are often used interchangeably. But they’re not the same. Disaster recovery is about bringing systems back online. Business continuity is everything that happens while they’re still down.

At CDW, we focus on that middle ground — how a nurse documents patient records without an EHR. How a pharmacist manually verifies a med. How care teams communicate when the phones are out. How supplies are ordered, or how staff can continue to be paid without an ERP.

In those moments, we can’t rely on instinct or hope. Instead, it’s all about planning, muscle memory and cross-functional coordination. Technology plays a key role, for sure. But people, process and preparation are what keep patients safe when systems fail.

What’s on the horizon?

What stood out most at HIMSS wasn’t just the innovation — it was the urgency. The leaders in our focus group weren’t there to talk theory. They were sharing real stories and asking tough questions.

More people are realizing we can’t just rely on infrastructure and hope. We need real-world plans that include clinicians, not just IT teams. That’s where the industry is going (and, frankly, where it has to go).

We know the risks: growing cyberthreats, complex system dependencies and real consequences when care is disrupted.

The next step? Building a playbook for when downtime strikes, actually performing downtime simulations and testing, testing, testing.

We’re doing that work now (and I’ll break it down in Part 2, by the way). In the meantime, I sat down with CDW Director of Strategic Industries Jennifer Gene to unpack more of what we heard at HIMSS. Check out the video of our conversation.

Stick around!

The stakes are too high to leave readiness to chance. It’s time to make resilience a priority for every patient and every clinician within your walls.

If you’re already thinking about how your organization can better prepare for downtime, contact your CDW account manager or visit CDW.com/healthcare. We’re here to help you plan for what’s next before it happens.