Turning out the lights: the importance of digital health resilience

We are at the start of the innovation curve of digital health, with intelligent systems providing doctors and clinical staff with new tools to
augment their delivery of care. The rapid role out of electronic patient records (EPRs) has given clinicians the ability to quickly analyse
medical data and images, request tests and message colleagues. The
clinical benefits of these systems are quite clear; however, there are
potential downsides. In order to use data wisely for clinical support,
data quality has to be high, requiring lengthy manual input. Many EPRs
have numerous clicks, steps and fields that need to be completed in
order to proceed to the next step of a clinical entry. Processes that
on paper could take seconds are now taking minutes, meaning that
doctors and nurses can be spending more than half of their clinical
time on computers—rather than with patients.
The reliance on technology also means that redundant manual
paper systems are forgotten much like the way that people rarely remember telephone numbers and rely on GPS for navigation. So,
when technology fails and we lose our electronic aids, how can we
deliver healthcare safely and what can we do to ensure that we are
ready for when the lights go out?