It is this increased collaboration that motivated Woods' colleague and fellow-presenter, Izabella Gieras, upon taking on the position of director of clinical technology at Huntington Hospital, to ask that her department report to the chief information officer in the event of planned or unplanned downtime.

“We want to inform our counterparts as much as possible to make sure there is nothing else taking place on the IT side or medical equipment side,” she said. “At that point, we don’t know really what it is, so we want to make sure we communicate as much as possible so that our counterparts can start exploring on their end and us on ours. When we all come together, we’re able to record what is going on.”


Though it can be minimized, the occurrence of downtime, planned or unplanned, is an issue that all providers will continue to face. Even facilities with fewer downtime events should continue to exercise plans for addressing these situations, as not doing so can, over time, lead to a lack of understanding of how to address downtime or prevent new staff from learning the proper protocols.

The key takeaway of the session, according to Randle, is that all players in the medical equipment industry have a responsibility to lay out a plan for communicating amongst one another to prevent such scenarios from occurring as much as possible, and to minimize the impact when they do.

“I don’t want there to be a sense of panic when things go down, because they’re going to go down. What I think we fail to do, at least as I can say in the places that I’ve been a manager at, is that managers shouldn’t be calling us. We should be giving them reports.”

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