Examining Factors That Contribute to the Planning Fallacy in Healthcare Cybersecurity Business Continuity Planning

Background Of The Problem

Patients now live longer and have a better quality of life due to various medical improvements. The collection, storage, and access of healthcare data have altered because of daily technological advancements. Healthcare firms must provide excellent service while remaining modern due to automation and legal requirements for enhanced backup and recovery systems (Gast, 2011).

Adoption of HIT and EHR in healthcare raises questions about the trustworthiness of automated IT systems. Medical systems that are essential cannot fail. To guarantee 99.99 percent uptime, Gartner urges all healthcare organizations to implement a formal high availability (HA) solution (Gast, 2011). High availability refers to a system (a network, a server array or cluster, etc.) that is intended to prevent service interruption by minimizing planned downtime and decreasing or managing faults (High Availability Solutions, 2022). College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) advises placing HA first while implementing clinical automation technologies (The Association for Executives in Healthcare Applications, Data & Analytics (AEHADA) Reveals Bold New Plan for Uniting Digital Health Tech Leadership - Healthcare IT - CHIME, 2023). For example, if an organization were to implement HA, one computer serves as the production processor, and the backup computer continuously updates. The software duplicates and monitors both servers, then users can instantly switch to the backup server if the primary server malfunctions or must be repaired. Networked systems are reconnected by the backup server. When production processing resumes, users and networked systems may “failback” to the primary server (Gast, 2011; High Availability Solutions, 2022). Critical systems are organization-specific and have a direct impact on patient care, such the hospital's code paging system. Ultimately, HA solutions are a possible strategy for healthcare professional to include in BCPs to mitigate operational failures from emergency scenarios.