Most health system continuity plans were built for a different disaster — severe weather, mass-casualty events, scheduled maintenance. Those are forecastable or finite. A cyber event is neither. It arrives without warning, often starts at a vendor you can’t see, and disables the very systems your downtime plan depends on.
And it doesn’t end in a day. One informatics leader estimated industry downtime after a cyber event at roughly 13 to 21 days; another system is preparing for a 21- to 40-day loss of technology. Meanwhile, AI is shrinking the time between a vulnerability appearing and an attacker finding it.
In a candid Becker’s Healthcare advisory call, informatics and technology executives from academic medical centers and large health systems shared what resilience now requires:
Why investment is moving from prevention to recovery
How to prove a recovery environment works before an incident — tested live, failed back
What hour zero demands when clinicians have never charted on paper
The leaders furthest along have stopped treating disruption as exceptional. They plan for it as a matter of when, not if — and treat resilience as a shared responsibility across the organization, not a job for IT alone. Get their strategies for making hour zero survivable before it arrives.