Any time there’s a disruption to the standard workflow of your organization, you can incur real financial losses. But one of the most expensive interruptions by far is IT or system downtime—when a technological issue temporarily shuts down operations. In healthcare, downtime often shows up as servers or applications going offline and leaving electronic health records (EHRs) partially available—or completely unavailable.
The consequences of healthcare downtime are far-reaching. Appointment scheduling stalls, clinicians can’t access patient records, and billing and payment processing get thrown into chaos. Downtime calculators and industry research commonly put losses in the hundreds of dollars per minute for smaller organizations and thousands per minute for larger, more tech-dependent operations—and that’s before you factor in reputational harm, patient impact, or regulatory exposure.
So what causes healthcare downtime, and how do you minimize it? Let’s break it down.
What Causes Healthcare Downtime?
There are a variety of circumstances that can trigger downtime in a clinical environment, including (but not limited to):
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Human error
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Internet outages
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Malfunctioning hardware
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Cybersecurity threats (including ransomware)
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Server instability
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Software updates and failed patches
Healthcare is a high-value target because attackers know how critical access is to patient care systems—and how expensive disruption can be. Unfortunately, many ransomware events don’t just “steal data.” They disrupt operations, lock systems, and trigger weeks of cleanup and recovery work.
A quick reality check on ransom demands
A few years ago, it was common to hear ransoms described as “hundreds or thousands of dollars.” That’s no longer a helpful framing. Reporting on 2024 healthcare ransomware incidents found average demands around $5.7M and average amounts paid around $900K. At the same time, 2025 survey data suggest the median healthcare ransom demand fell to about $343K, with a median amount paid of $150K—even though high-impact incidents can still reach the millions.
And when a major vendor or clearinghouse gets hit, the downtime ripple effect can be enormous. The Change Healthcare incident is a clear example: the cyberattack disrupted billing and claims processing nationwide, and claims processing functionality was restored in late March—roughly five weeks after the outage began.
UnitedHealth later said the incident affected the personal information of about 190 million people.
What Are Some Effects of Healthcare Downtime?
Downtime in healthcare can result in:
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Patients missing appointments
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Delays in treatment due to limited access to clinical history and documentation
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Manual workarounds that increase the risk of documentation errors
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Disrupted lab/radiology workflows and slower turnaround times
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Lost revenue from scheduling disruptions and billing delays
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Higher labor costs as teams “double document” or re-enter data
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Potential regulatory exposure if downtime contributes to improper access, loss of availability, or reporting issues
Lost revenue is a serious concern, but the risk goes beyond dollars. In healthcare, downtime can quickly become a patient safety issue—especially when clinical decisions depend on accurate, timely information.
Additionally, healthcare downtime can cost your organization its reputation, productivity, and future opportunities. Patients and referral partners remember operational instability.
What Is EHR Downtime?
One of the most disruptive forms of downtime in healthcare is EHR downtime—any period in which your EHR can only be partially accessed or is unavailable.
Not only is this disruptive to workflow, it can create real risk:
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Care teams may lack medication lists, allergies, or recent notes
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Orders may be delayed or duplicated
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Reporting and documentation backlogs pile up fast
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Recovery can take longer than expected, even after systems “come back online”
When EHRs are unavailable for a couple of hours (or a full day), or when radiology applications can’t transmit X-rays, MRIs, or ultrasounds, the impact goes far beyond staff inconvenience. It affects throughput, quality, and patient experience.
How Can Lost Revenue From Healthcare Downtime Be Calculated?
It’s important to remember that downtime impacts more than the revenue line. It affects:
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Patient safety and patient outcomes
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Patient treatment timelines
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Customer service and patient satisfaction
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Hospital/practice reputation
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Community trust
Standard costing modules can estimate direct losses (missed visits, delayed procedures, denied claims, overtime hours), but they can’t fully quantify the human toll.
That said, external research helps us understand scale:
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A Health Informatics Journal scoping review found 166 U.S. hospitals experienced 701 total days of downtime across 43 events from 2012 to 2018—and nearly half of those events involved some form of cyberattack.
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More recently, a JAMA Network Open study analyzing the July 19, 2024 CrowdStrike outage detected measurable service disruptions at 759 U.S. hospitals (34%) among those with available data. The study also reported a median downtime of 5.1 hours, and found that about 22% of identified outages were tied to direct patient-facing services.
On the cost side, “per-minute” figures can vary widely depending on the size and complexity of your environment, but the overall trend is clear: significant outages regularly produce six- and seven-figure impacts. For example, Uptime Institute’s 2024 outage analysis reported that more than half of respondents said their most recent significant outage cost over $100,000, and 16% reported costs over $1 million.
Even if the underlying cause is performance-related (hardware failure, update issues, ISP outage) rather than security-related (ransomware), the operational pain is the same: schedules break, teams scramble, and patient care slows down.
And unlike many other industries, healthcare downtime can come with added exposure—especially if the event contributes to HIPAA violations, reportable incidents, or broader patient trust issues.
Why the Numbers Keep Getting Worse
One reason downtime risk keeps rising is that the environment keeps getting more hostile.
Healthcare breach reporting summaries have shown that large breach volumes remain persistently high, with hundreds of “large breaches” (500+ records) reported each year. In 2024 alone, reporting based on HHS OCR data described 725 large breaches and more than 275 million people affected—driven in large part by mega-incidents.
That combination—high breach frequency plus occasional “whale” incidents—means more organizations are forced into incident response, recovery work, emergency workflows, and expensive remediation. Even when downtime isn’t the headline, it’s often part of the real-world operational cost.
How We Help Healthcare Organizations Reduce Downtime Risk
There’s no way to eliminate every risk. But you can reduce the likelihood and impact of downtime by treating availability as both an IT goal and a cybersecurity goal.
Here’s what we focus on with healthcare clients:
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Resilience first: backups you can actually restore, and recovery plans you’ve tested
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Secure, controlled change management: fewer “surprise” outages from rushed updates or misconfigurations
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Layered security to reduce ransomware likelihood: MFA, endpoint controls, email security, and monitoring
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Network segmentation and least-privilege access: limit blast radius when something goes wrong
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Downtime planning for clinical operations: documented procedures, forms, and drills so staff aren’t improvising under pressure
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Incident response readiness: clear roles, escalation paths, and vendor coordination before the emergency happens
At Managed Services Group, we help healthcare organizations reduce downtime risk by protecting against cyberattacks and strengthening operational resilience. We’re a SOC 2 Type 2 audited MSP/MSSP, and we take availability and security seriously—because in healthcare, they’re inseparable.
If you’re a healthcare organization and you want a clearer picture of where downtime risk is hiding in your environment, contact us today, and book a free network analysis with our team.