Implications of Electronic Health Record Downtime An Analysis of Patient Safety Event Reports

The authors reviewed over 80,000 patient safety event reports and identified 76 associated with EHR downtime. They found that 48% of those were associated with lab results, while 14% were associated with medications. For 46% of events, there were no downtime procedures, or the procedure was not followed. They concluded that areas of risk during downtime included patient identification and clinical information communication, which should be planned for during contingency preparation.