Dealing with Computer Crashes in the Digital Office

Power outages and computer crashes are a real part of an EMR system (unfortunately). See Michelle Greiver's post on back-to-back power outages. We leave the UPS and back-up issues to the IT folks although we do a yearly simulation to ensure the systems actually work and back-ups are intact as we've had bad back-up tapes before.

In our clinic, we did an analysis of what we would need to run the clinic for 3 days without computers and came up with a "computer crash box". It used more commonly during major network issues than day long crashes. Included in the kit are calculators, receipt pads, spiral note book to take referrals and record appointments to make. We also download a list of 'critical' appointments for the next 2 weeks every day to desktop computers throughout the network. That way each site has a list of patients to call for upcoming appointments.