When Your EHR Is Down, WISHIN Is There For You and Your Patients

If a breakdown occurs in an electronic health record (EHR) system, WISHIN clients enjoy the peace of mind that comes from knowing that the WISHIN Pulse system is a secure alternative source for accessing your patients’ clinical history. With WISHIN, participating organizations automatically and prospectively share their clinical records in near-real time, so the instant an outage hits, WISHIN Pulse is there to deliver the information you need to continue to serve your patients.

Recent news reports serve as a reminder that EHR systems can suddenly become inaccessible due to cybersecurity incidents or other causes.

In 2017, Door County Medical Center (DCMC), a long-time WISHIN client, faced a potential disaster when its EHR system failed to restore after a routine planned data migration. Members of the DCMC Incident Command Team determined that WISHIN Pulse could be used as a temporary replacement for the clinical history stored in the DCMC EHR. Watch this video to see how WISHIN helped DCMC handle this challenge.

“The available information from WISHIN immediately solved problems with patient contacts, history, and diagnostic study availability,” said Nancy Davis, Director of Compliance and Safety at DCMC. “It was determined that facilitating clinic provider and staff access to WISHIN would be beneficial for (accessing) patient demographics, including phone numbers, diagnostic studies, laboratory results, etc.”

DCMC’s EHR system was back online after several anxious hours. “It was a long day,” Davis said, “however, we were able to mitigate many issues by (accessing DCMC’s information available in WISHIN.”

Don’t be caught off-guard when there is an EHR breakdown. Breakdowns have happened and will happen again. Policies and procedures should include emergency readiness and contingency planning. Make WISHIN part of the plan.

Contact wishin@wishin.org for more information.