During today’s #HITsm chat, Twitter went down. Well, the web interface for Twitter went down. We could still access Twitter through third party vendors like Hootsuite and Tweetdeck. However, Twitter in a web browser wasn’t loading. Ironically, I went to find a Twitter status page to wonder if this was the case or if it was just my computer and I found a Twitter API status page that said everything was fine. I never found a Twitter web interface status page, but I digress.
When Twitter went down, I tweeted out:
Today’s Lesson: A tweetchat isn’t very good when Twitter is down.
Of course, Twitter was down, so I wasn’t sure anyone would see it and I love the irony that I sent a tweet about Twitter being down (through Hootsuite of course). Well, Erica Olenski saw my tweet and replied:
Probably a good lesson and insight especially considering the role of technology in improving acute healthcare situations.
My goodness, she’s right!
While a Twitter chat isn’t the end of the world, no one got hurt, and we all moved on with life. The same isn’t true with many of the health IT solutions out there. A telehealth solution that’s down doesn’t solve any problems. It just causes more. That sweet AI solution you implemented to get the doctor access to context relevant data from your EHR and other data sources is amazing until it’s down.
Of course, we’ve seen this first hand when an EHR goes down or when ransomware hits an organization and they don’t have access to the system anymore. We realize how dependent we are on technology.
Given it’s Friday and this is kind of like a Fun Friday post, I figured I should tie this into the coming Super Bowl too (Who do you want to win? I’m taking the Bengals and Joe Burrow). In football there’s a common saying when evaluating players that goes like this:
The Best Ability Is Availability
See what they did there. I don’t care if Zion Williamson is the greatest basketball player in the world. He’s been injured and can’t play. All that ability isn’t doing any good sitting at home. Yes, I did just mix football and basketball analogies, but you get the point. This principle applies to every sport and to healthcare IT. A great solution that’s not reliable is not worth very much.
This reminds me of the time we implemented a lab interface with our EHR. It was amazing and glorious. All that manual entry was gone. No more human error in inputting it. Lab results went automatically back to the EHR for the doctor to see. Everything about the interface was wonderful when it came to saving people time, accuracy of data, and a better experience.
You know what happens next. The interface went down. All that happiness and joy that the interface provided was gone. Of course, it didn’t happen for like 6 months and so we’d forgotten how to do it without the interface. No doubt there’s a business continuity lesson here as well. Have a backup plan for when your systems are down. However, that beautiful lab interface that made life so much better and easier actually had the opposite effect when it was down.
Let’s be honest, most health IT systems have done a good job of this. I don’t hear tons of complaints about systems being down. However, this is probably a good reminder that it can happen and we should be prepared. Or you could be like the OB/GYN I visited when my 4th child was arriving who didn’t know which EHR they had and asked the nurse to check. The nurse went to check the EHR and it was down. Amazing. The EHR was down and no one even knew or cared. That’s a different problem all together.
