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What Downtime Really Costs a Medical Office

What Downtime Really Costs a Medical Office

When your EHR goes down during morning check-in, the clock starts. Not just on the IT fix—on everything downstream.

The visible cost

Patients wait. Front desk staff switch to paper intake forms (if they can find them). Providers can't see medication histories, allergy lists, or recent labs. Billing stops because nobody can enter charges.

For a 4-provider practice seeing 80 patients a day, one hour of EHR downtime means roughly:

  • 20 patients affected directly
  • $4,000–$8,000 in delayed or lost billing
  • 2–4 staff hours spent re-entering data after recovery

These numbers compound quickly. A practice that experiences downtime twice a month is leaking $100K+ annually in productivity alone.

The invisible cost

Documentation gaps. Notes taken on paper during downtime rarely make it back into the chart completely.

HIPAA exposure. Paper workarounds during downtime often bypass normal access controls.

Staff burnout. The team that scrambled during the outage now has an extra two hours of data entry ahead of them.

Why it keeps happening

  1. Reactive MSP. The managed service provider responds when things break but doesn't proactively test recovery paths.
  2. Untested backups. Backups run nightly, but nobody has verified that a full restore actually works.
  3. Single points of failure. One device fails and the entire practice stops.
  4. Deferred updates. Updates get postponed because "we can't afford the downtime"—which ironically creates more unplanned downtime.

What a stable environment looks like

  • Recovery is tested. Quarterly restore tests with documented results.
  • Drift is monitored. Configuration changes are tracked against a known-good baseline.
  • Knowledge is documented. Password locations, escalation paths, vendor contacts, and emergency procedures exist in a runbook.

If your practice experiences recurring downtime, the Infrastructure Health Check can map your actual risk surface in two weeks.

Not sure how exposed you are?Take the 2-minute self-assessment to see where your practice stands.