The moment screens go dark, critical care costs you $5,600 per minute | Viewpoint

Digital platforms were sold as the cure for illegible handwriting and missing charts—a seamless, always‑on network of data meant to anticipate drug interactions, surface allergy alerts, and keep every caregiver on the same page.

Greg Davis

However, the moment a switch fails or a fiber link is cut, that seamless network splinters. Essential information—last troponin level, weight‑based heparin dose, telemetry alarms, etc.—can vanish behind a frozen screen.

In those minutes, the clinical team is forced to fly blind, re‑enter orders from memory, and chase paper printouts. A single lapse can trigger a duplicated opioid dose in the ICU, or a missed radiology follow‑up that pushes a treatable lesion past the surgical window.

What was once billed as efficiency now becomes a liability, undoing months of process‑improvement work and exposing patients—and the organization—to avoidable harm.

How downtime delays critical care decisions

Industry research values every minute of unplanned downtime at roughly $5,600; that’s about $336,000 an hour. Inside that window, allergy alerts disappear, previous imaging can’t be pulled, and lab trends stay locked behind a frozen login. In stroke, sepsis, or trauma, that latency can convert reversible harm into permanent loss.

The economic tail is even longer. One multi‑year analysis of ransomware incidents pegs the average impact at 17 days offline and $1.9 million in daily losses. Factor in surgical backlogs, readmissions, and potential malpractice claims, and you’ll see how downtime leverage is measured in lives, not lines of code.

Disconnected teams, disrupted care

During the July 2024 global outage triggered by a faulty endpoint‑security update, nurses at several hospitals resorted to dry‑erase boards while telemetry alarms sat silent. A separate survey shows 98% of enterprises lose at least $100,000 for every hour systems are down. Behind those numbers are canceled imaging slots, diverted ambulances, idle OR teams, and overtime for manual data entry after the reboot.

Clinicians feel the strain first as they endlessly scribble vital signs on sticky notes, wait for pharmacy verification, or phone radiology to re‑fax a CT prelim. Each workaround adds cognitive load and erodes the margin for error, which is a fertile ground for staff burnout and turnover.

The dangerous workarounds: Compliance and privacy

When core apps stall, ingenuity takes over—and not always for the better.

Personal phones capture whiteboard snapshots, prescriptions land on unsecured email, and hastily scrawled notes go missing in a shift change. Monitoring data across thousands of healthcare circuits finds systems effectively unusable for an average of 604 hours a year. Every one of those hours gives HIPAA regulators and class‑action attorneys a wider target.

Shadow IT isn’t just a privacy issue. A missed decimal on a handwritten insulin order or the loss of an unsigned consent form can cascade into patient harm and regulatory fines.

Here’s how you can build resilience before the next outage:

Cache read‑only patient data locally: Clinicians can still view allergies, meds, and recent results even if the primary EHR is offline.

Run downtime drills like code blues: Quarterly practice surfaces policy gaps—before a real incident does.

Treat observability as a quality metric: Alert ClinOps when latency or packet loss crosses preset thresholds.

Design redundant communication paths: Private LTE or Wi‑Fi calling keeps care teams linked if VOIP drops.

Embed cybersecurity in patient‑safety rounds: Phishing prevention and patch hygiene reduce the odds of a catastrophic lockout.

Boards readily fund surgical robots and specialty towers. However, the humble network switch can topple the whole enterprise. Position downtime as potentially lethal latency, not as lost productivity. Patients don’t care whether the root cause was a fiber cut or a zero‑day exploit—only that the CT order never reached radiology.

The technology to harden our digital backbone already exists; what’s required now is executive resolve. Elevate uptime to the same priority as surgical counts or medication reconciliation, and match it with continuous investment in redundancy, observability, and cyber hygiene.

Because when systems blink, lives blink with them, and that’s a risk no healthcare leader can afford to turn a blind eye on.

Greg Davis is CEO at Bigleaf Networks