Downtime in healthcare is inevitable. Planned system upgrades, infrastructure failures, and cyber incidents can all disrupt EHR access and put patient care at risk. Historically, many organizations have relied on manually updated downtime reports distributed across hospital PCs. These approaches are increasingly outdated and typically provide only limited data, often reflecting information from hours before a disruption occurs.
During more severe disruptions, hospitals may be forced to fail over to a disaster recovery solution that replicates clinical systems off site. Full disaster recovery approaches or true dual systems are often expensive and complex, placing them out of reach for many small and mid‑sized hospitals with constrained financial resources. Even when a disaster recovery failover is justified, the time required to bring those systems fully online can leave clinicians and physicians without timely access to critical patient data. This gap underscores the need for a solution that delivers reliable access and allows clinicians to log in with minimal delay.
Frederick Health has encountered this challenge firsthand. As Jackie Rice, Vice President and Chief Information Officer, explains, the organization recognized both the financial and operational need to move away from traditional report‑based downtime solutions. At the same time, full disaster recovery models were difficult to justify for routine downtime scenarios. To address this gap, Frederick Health implemented an EMR downtime and business continuity solution from IPeople Healthcare, now part of RLDatix, purpose‑built for MEDITECH environments.
Instead of replicating the entire EHR, IPeople maintains a secure, on‑premises copy of critical patient data that is refreshed in near real time. In certain configurations, this data can also be replicated to additional facilities or secure cloud environments to further enhance data resilience. When the primary EHR or local network becomes unavailable, clinicians can quickly access essential patient information through an intranet‑based web application. If the local network is also unavailable, the data is delivered to dedicated, isolated workstations, restoring visibility into patient records within minutes.
Beyond data access, IPeople addresses one of the most operationally challenging aspects of downtime: patient movement and the extensive manual reconciliation that typically follows. The solution supports safe clinical operations during downtime, including long‑form admissions, discharges, and transfers. Once MEDITECH is restored, all registration activity captured during the outage synchronizes back into the EHR with a single action, significantly reducing reconciliation effort and the risk of documentation errors.
By preserving familiar workflows and minimizing reliance on paper processes, this practical approach helps reduce cognitive burden on staff during high‑stress events. The result is a cost‑effective and reliable way to safeguard access to critical patient data and maintain continuity of care, without relying on outdated manual reporting processes or complex, expensive traditional disaster recovery architectures.
To learn more, watch the full conversation with Frederick Health CIO Jackie Rice and IPeople Healthcare President Ryan Dickerson as they discuss rethinking downtime preparedness and finding the right balance between resilience, usability, and cost.
Learn more about iPeople Healthcare: https://www.ipeople.com/
Learn more about Frederick Health: https://www.frederickhealth.org/
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