Off the Cuff: Internet Outage Agony

First thing on Wednesday morning I get a call from my office that the internet is down. Sorta. Some things are working, some aren’t, some are ethernet, some are wifi. No rhyme or reason. Sigh. I call our provider who initially tells me they can see our modem. All is well on their end, but they’ll send a reboot signal to the modem, and I should call back if that doesn’t resolve the issue. It didn’t. When I call back the second time, I now get a recording that there is an outage in our area that technicians are working on resolving. That would’ve been nice to know the first time. Best estimate is that we’ll be back up around 1:30 in the afternoon. It never came back up. My staff were troopers and pushed through. Thursday comes and our internet provider again assures me we’re getting amazing signals. It has to be our other equipment.

This was Dr. Epstein’s forte. He did all the cabling and network setup when we built the office. I have a general understanding of our network, but he was excellent at those kinds of things and may have seriously missed a calling. Anyway, after troubleshooting with our non-Epstein IT guy, he’s convinced it’s our network switch. After canceling patients and driving around to three different stores to acquire new said switch, it didn’t work. In fact, it may have even gotten worse for all my efforts. As I write this, I can’t get anyone to come to the office until Saturday. This is the longest it’s ever been down. We’ve been able to access our EHR and some instruments by running off hotspots from our individual cell phones. I have since purchased a 5G whole-office backup internet hotspot that Dr. Zagelbaum found. We’ll be ready for next time.

I would never want to go back to paper charts and paper billing. I love all the wonderful things about our “paperless office” and love the technology. This outage happening on top of the Change Healthcare shutdown has really illuminated for me how much I count on multiple connected systems to make my practice work. I have come to count on our cloud-based EHR, our equipment viewing software in every exam room and office, our internet-based phone and fax systems, as well as our EHR integrated patient communication software. It’s a seamless symphony that just makes life easier for my staff and providers. The internet service that all this relies on is largely overlooked until it seriously makes its presence, or lack thereof, known. Once the new hotspot arrives, a newly minted internet recovery plan will be implemented and tailored so anyone in the office can get us back up and running and prevent any disruption to patient care again.

Shannon L. Steinh?user, OD, MS, FAAO - Chief Medical Editor [email protected]