Health IT Summit: Strategies to cope with IT outages

CAMBRIDGE, MASS. – Health IT may hold the promise to better coordinated care and improved health outcomes, but a power outage can quickly turn this digital advantage into a nightmare if planning and employee communication strategies are not in place, said Chris Petteruti, director of technology at the Permanente Group,speaking at the Institute of Health Technology Transformation’s Boston Health IT Summit on May 8.

Petteruti oversees IT at 21 hospitals and 70 medical office buildings that touch 3.5 million members and 7,000 physicians within Kaiser Permanente Northern California. When the IT systems crashed while implementing phase two of computerized physician order entry in the EHR, “it was a complete nightmare,” he said. The IT department could not adequately notify managers and front line staff, and the communication failure put patient care at risk.

After this incident, Petteruti and his team set out to eliminate clinician frustration during IT outages and improve employee communication with desktop messages.

The answer was employing an HQ two-way mass notification system that can communicate with email, telephone and clinicians’ workstations. Petteruti hired a vendor, which previously had worked for the Department of Defense, to develop this communication platform.

After a six-month pilot, the IT systems experienced an early morning crash after implementing a new EHR platform. Messages went out on all inpatient workstations, as well as a request not to send patients to labs. “We didn’t rely on managers, the messages were sent out to end users,’ he said.  

Despite this success, Petteruti said Kaiser leadership balked at the cost of the platform. However, he was able to make the business case when he realized the communications platform could be used to contact nurses when filling in gaps in scheduling, which saved time and money.

“We were able to prove ROI and prove that nurses got called by seniority,” he said, explaining that an auto log contained all outgoing calls with time-stamp information. “That sold it for us.”

Another network crash that took place on Christmas Eve that lasted one hour and twenty minutes. The platform sent 12,000 desktop alerts, which all linked to an alternate logon page. “Our users were able to recover within three minutes,” Petteruti said.

He said code-wide policies and procedures also were developed, with attached paper order sets, in the case of a complete outage.

Petteruti said the IT team currently are working to expand the technology for use by clinical staff at home visits, so they can hit a duress button on their mobile phones to alert the provider of an urgent safety situation.