Hospital nurses feel unprepared to safely manage patient care during prolonged cyber-related technology outages, a May 6 report from Black Book Research found.
The report, titled “The Nurse Cyber-Downtime Gap,” surveyed 480 registered nurses and examined hospital cyber-downtime readiness from the bedside perspective.
Here are four findings from the survey:
- Among surveyed nurses, 78% said they experienced at least one unplanned clinical technology outage or disruption in the last year, while 64% reported they had not participated in a realistic downtime drill during that period.
- Additionally, 62% said they were not confident their unit could safely administer medications for four or more hours without access to electronic medication administration records or barcode medication administration systems.
- Medication safety emerged as the top concern among respondents. Sixty-seven percent identified medication administration or dispensing systems as the highest-risk technology failure point, while 81% selected medication dispensing or order-access disruptions as the greatest immediate patient safety risk when electronic health record order access was included.
- The survey also found that 91% of respondents did not report clear inclusion of bedside registered nurses in cyber-downtime planning or tabletop exercises. More than half, 55%, said backup communication systems would be unreliable if secure chat, Wi-Fi, phones or voice over internet protocol systems failed.
The report recommends hospitals treat cyber downtime as a patient safety issue rather than only an IT recovery event and conduct more realistic unit-level drills involving medication administration, communication workflows and documentation recovery.
