How Modernization Can Prevent Disruptions In Patient Care

James Lindsey is the IT Strategy and Innovation Principal at Texas Oncology.

Healthcare has never been more dependent on technology. Electronic health records, digital imaging, automated medication management, virtual care, scheduling platforms and countless connected systems form the infrastructure through which care is delivered.

When those systems work as intended, healthcare can become faster, safer and more efficient for patients. But when they don’t, consequences can arise, and those consequences can extend far beyond the IT department. Consider a health system that experiences a prolonged network disruption; clinicians and other staff may have to rely on downtime procedures. In some cases, a disruption can last days or longer, requiring healthcare organizations to run manual processes while maintaining patient safety and continuity of care.

The reality is that technology is now fundamental to modern care. The challenge, however, is that clinical workflows have not always evolved alongside that dependence.

The Hidden Cost Of Outdated Workflows

When a digital system goes down, healthcare organizations often revert to processes that were designed years, sometimes decades, ago. For example, to communicate critical information that usually automatically moves between systems, teams might use paper documentation, manual data entry and phone calls.

Those measures are necessary, but they also reveal an important gap: In many organizations, the backup workflow is dramatically less sophisticated than the primary digital workflow. Back when a health system relied primarily on paper records, a certain process may have been adequate. But in the digital era, when thousands of clinical and administrative transactions move through interconnected systems each day, that same process is arguably much harder to execute efficiently.

Why does that gap matter? Modern healthcare is increasingly interconnected. Consider a single patient visit. It can involve far more than just an electronic health record. It could also involve a laboratory system, imaging platform and multiple third-party services. When just one component becomes unavailable, the impact can cascade across seemingly unrelated parts of the organization.

The 2024 cyberattack on Change Healthcare shows the significance of these interdependencies. The American Hospital Association examined the aftermath of that cyberattack in a survey of approximately 1,000 hospitals in March 2024. One finding was that “74% reported direct patient care impact, including delays in authorizations for medically necessary care.” In my view, this shows why leaders of healthcare organizations need to think about resilience outside their own technology environments, not just within them.

Modernization Should Mean More Than Newer Technology

From my observations, many healthcare organizations approach modernization as an exercise in technology replacement. For example, their leaders might opt to migrate to the cloud or implement automation. Those investments can be valuable, but it’s not just technology that modernizes a workflow.

True modernization starts by examining how work actually happens. Leaders should think through where clinicians are still entering the same information multiple times, where staff are relying on manual handoffs, where one system becoming unavailable creates downstream problems and which processes depend on a single application, vendor or network connection. These are the types of questions that can help leaders uncover opportunities to improve both everyday efficiency and resilience during disruption.

Instead of merely digitizing inefficient processes, leaders should prioritize creating workflows that are digitally enabled but operationally resilient. This distinction matters even more as organizations adopt increasingly sophisticated technology; without thoughtful design at the forefront, the technology stack can become harder for staff to navigate. Adding another application, integration, automation layer or other technology component can create new dependencies and a more complicated web of systems.

The Importance Of Designing For Graceful Degradation

Even well-designed systems can be affected by circumstances outside an organization’s direct control, such as cyberattacks and severe weather. Healthcare organizations can’t prevent every possible technology failure. However, they can design for graceful degradation, which is the ability for critical functions to continue safely when part of the technology environment is unavailable.

Designing for graceful degradation means asking these questions during technology planning, not during an outage:

• “If the EHR is unavailable, what information must remain accessible?”

• “If a vendor’s platform goes offline, what critical functions can continue?”

• “If network connectivity is interrupted, which clinical processes can operate locally?”

• “When systems return, how will information captured during downtime be reconciled accurately and efficiently?”

Restoring a server or application isn’t the same as restoring healthcare operations, as reflected in the American Hospital Association and the Joint Commission’s Cyber Resilience Readiness program, which launched in May 2026. The initiative focuses on helping systems sustain safe clinical operations during cyber-related technology outages lasting 30 days or more. It emphasizes clinical continuity and patient safety alongside traditional technology recovery efforts.

Why Clinicians Should Be At The Center Of Modernization

From my observations, many clinicians tend to experience technology through a series of tasks, such as reviewing a patient’s history, documenting a visit, communicating with another care team or coordinating a patient’s next appointment.

That’s why I believe that modernization should begin with these workflows in mind. Rather than primarily thinking about which features a technology platform offers, leaders should consider how a technology platform changes the way clinicians work and whether it eliminates unnecessary steps, duplicate documentation and manual handoffs.

Leaders should also ask what happens to a given workflow if the technology behind it becomes unavailable. That question can expose vulnerabilities that traditional technology assessments miss. A process may appear highly efficient when every system is functioning, but if a single application going offline forces staff to abandon the process entirely, the organization may have optimized for efficiency without adequately planning for resilience.

Resilience And Efficiency Can Reinforce Each Other

I’ve noticed that sometimes, leaders think building redundancy and downtime capabilities adds complexity and cost. But outdated workflows have their own costs. They consume staff time, increase administrative burden, create opportunities for error and make it more challenging for organizations to operate during periods of disruption.

Modernizing workflows can address both problems at once. For example, an automated process that eliminates unnecessary manual work during normal operations can also include a reliable fallback when automation is unavailable.

Effective modernization strategies improve both normal days and abnormal ones.

Rethinking The Measure Of Modern Healthcare Technology

Leaders of healthcare organizations should continue asking whether their technology is secure, scalable, efficient and innovative. But another question deserves equal attention: Is the technology resilient enough to keep patient care moving when something goes wrong?

Answering that question shouldn’t be the IT department’s responsibility alone. It requires collaboration among technology leaders, clinicians, operations teams, security professionals, executives and frontline staff. It calls for testing downtime procedures in realistic conditions and designing workflows around how care is delivered, not how individual technology systems are configured.

Leaders shouldn’t view healthcare modernization as simply adding newer technology to their organizations. They should view it as an effort to help clinicians and other staff use technology intelligently while continuing to deliver safe, effective care when that technology isn’t available.

The ultimate measure of a modern healthcare technology environment isn’t whether everything works all the time. It’s whether patient care can continue when it doesn’t.

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