Hospitals and health systems must be prepared for disruption. COVID happened. The Change Healthcare cyberattack happened. Catastrophic hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, and blizzards continue to happen. Increasingly sophisticated ransomware attacks targeting healthcare delivery are happening daily.
The time to develop carefully considered, strategic responses to disruptions is not during an EHR outage or after access to supplies is lost. Preparation must occur in advance. Take the time to think through your business continuity plans and actively engage with your business unit leaders. Work with a trusted partner and take a holistic approach to business continuity, focusing on the impact of disruption. Practice, teach, and work toward a culture of preparedness.
4 Keys to Successful Business Continuity
1) Develop a Hollistic Plan Focused on Impacts
An effective business continuity plan needs to be holistic. Any risk that could disrupt your ability to provide care or manage the business must be factored into business continuity planning. The cause of disruption is largely immaterial. Your business continuity plan needs to focus on dealing with the impact of a given disruption. For example, was there a loss of technology? Are staff unable to make it into work? Have you lost access to certain supplies?
All third-party vendors and outside service providers that play a role in your business functions should be approached in the same manner as your internal systems and functions. If your organization cannot process claims, your immediate response is not dependent on whether the disruption is due to a problem with a third-party cloud vendor or an on-site application.
2) Ensure Business Unit Owners Are Engaged and Accountable
Responsibility for business continuity plans lies with each business unit. The head of radiology should have a plan for radiology, the head of laboratory should have a plan for lab services, and the head of admissions should have a plan for intake. Business unit leaders understand their workflows and how their business functions operate. They know the skills required, the responsibilities of staff members, and the necessary steps to complete their job.
This may represent a significant cultural shift for many organizations, as there is often a misconception that business continuity is an IT issue. While IT plays an important supporting role and will have business continuity responsibilities, the business owners need to drive the process and embrace accountability for the plan to be successful.
3) Regularly Update Your Plan and Train Staff
Developing an enterprise business continuity plan is not a one-time event. Your environment constantly changes; the business continuity plan must be dynamic. From nursing to IT to revenue cycle, there is a constant influx of employees. Many will be new hires, while others may be staff transferring from one department to another, where the business continuity plan is different. Business continuity needs to include a well-defined training program that is refreshed continuously. New department members should be educated as part of onboarding and, like all staff, receive refresher training at least once a year. It is far less expensive to educate employees and build preparedness into your culture than to have unprepared people make costly mistakes during a disruption.
Regular, proactive training on what to do during a disruption is only part of business continuity. Every staff member needs to understand their unique responsibilities to help the organization recover after the disruption has passed. For example, in an EHR outage, paper documents supporting clinical workflows will likely be used. How do you get that handwritten information into the system after it returns online? How do you make sure charges have been captured correctly and that manually recorded diagnoses have been entered accurately into the system? Mistakes made in the recovery process are just as impactful as those made during the disruption itself.
4) Work With an Experienced Partner to Help You Build a Foundation for Success
An experienced partner can help you get started and build the foundation for success. Work with your partner to pick a few key business functions to pilot and pull those teams together from across the enterprise. For example, if you start with lab services, don’t focus solely on stakeholders from the main hospital’s lab. Ensure representation from every location and all specialties. Leverage commonalities where possible, but account for important differences between sites. 80% of the lab business continuity plan may be universal across lab locations, but there may be an important 20% variance you need to accommodate from site to site, based on the way each lab treats its patients.
The right partner can add value by bringing in a flexible approach and methodology for business continuity that can leverage the positive things you are already doing. Your partner should work collaboratively to develop business continuity plans in a few high-priority areas, establishing an ongoing process and culture, not build binders that sit on a shelf gathering dust.
Ready to protect your healthcare organization and build your Business Continuity Plan? Contact our experts today.
