Earlier this year, an unexpected power outage cut the feed to electronic health records and the backup data, leaving providers and staff at the Family Medicine Center at Asylum Hill in panic. They had no way to access the clinic’s critical patient medical history, which is required to treat patients.
With no insight into when the system would be restored, they were in urgent need of a solution that would allow them to keep their doors open. Connie – Connecticut’s new nonprofit health information exchange – was able to quickly step in and provide an alternative to closing the clinic by enabling secure access to critical patient information at Asylum Hill. Within just a few hours, the practice’s clinicians gained access to patients’ recent clinical notes, medications, allergies, lab results, hospitalizations and imaging results to continue providing care.
Originally conceived by the legislature and other leaders to facilitate secure and efficient exchange of healthcare information, Connie’s capability to serve as an emergency backup solution has become an increasing asset across the state when inevitable health technology failures strike.
Threat of healthcare organization’s reliance on a single technology
The outage at Asylum Hill is not a rare occurrence for healthcare organizations. Technology systems experience prolonged downtime for a variety of routine reasons, including weather disruptions, necessary software updates, transitioning off a legacy system and even the complex process of switching electronic medical records systems.
Adding another layer of threat and a growing cause of health care facility emergency closures nationwide, is the dreaded prevalence of cyberattacks that have dominated recent headlines. The health information of nearly 100 million Americans was compromised in 2023 from one single attack, which also delayed 1 in 3 healthcare claims.
This is an issue that Connecticut has become all too familiar with over the past year with multiple technology failures occurring, including the particularly turbulent 2023 cyberattack at Prospect Medical Holdings. That breach resulted in more than a month of downtime for Manchester Memorial Hospital, Rockville General Hospital and Waterbury Hospital, and diverted access to care and scheduled procedures for countless patients and emergency services, even forcing some to seek emergency treatment in Massachusetts.
Collaborating together to be better prepared
The real crisis posed by these disruptions is their impact on critical life-or-death situations. A single outage may impact multiple hospitals, health systems and emergency services, and requires diversion of services to other facilities, leading to busier facilities elsewhere and even more cascading issues.
This is such a significant issue that emergency department and ambulance diversions can trigger declarations of a state of emergency – as seen with the Prospect Medical Holdings in Connecticut. Disruptions to essential health care technologies are threats to life and risk the safety of entire communities.
The key solution is to keep critical services open by ensuring the availability of an emergency backup solution for medical information. Proactively connecting with the state’s health information exchange before a crisis occurs is the most effective approach. It’s simple, quick, secure and provides the best support for patients and providers.
And while Connie cannot replace electronic health records or guarantee the complete data they contain, it can serve as an efficient and secure alternative to facility closures and the diversion of care.
The well-being of millions of patients in Connecticut relies on preserving the integrity and accessibility of health data. This is less about eliminating one threat and more about addressing the reliance on singular systems that make disruptions such a critical emergency in the first place.
Jenn Searls is the executive director at Connie, the state of Connecticut’s official health information exchange. Prior to joining Connie, she was the chief operating officer at SOHO Health where she led the effort to scale the former Saint Francis Healthcare Partners to a regional clinically integrated network for the 1,700 providers and five hospitals affiliated with Trinity Health Of New England. Dr. Thomas Agresta is a medical professional currently serving as chair of the Department of Family Medicine at UConn Health. He is also a professor and the director of Medical Informatics in Family Medicine, and the director of Clinical Informatics in the Center for Quantitative Medicine at UConn. He has held state level leadership roles in adoption and implementation for Health Information Exchange and Electronic Health Records.
