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Healthcare Downtime Cost Calculator
In a clinic or practice, IT downtime is not an inconvenience — it is a clinical and financial event. When the EHR is unreachable, providers fall back to paper charting, appointment schedules become guesswork, and every downtime-hour creates hours of catch-up documentation afterwards. Billing and eligibility checks stall, which delays revenue even after systems recover.
Healthcare also operates under obligations most industries do not: patient data must remain protected during incidents, and practices are expected to have documented downtime procedures. An outage that disrupts scheduled appointments can mean canceled visits that never rebook — revenue that is simply gone rather than deferred. This calculator applies a 1.3 revenue multiplier for healthcare to reflect that combination of direct revenue interruption and elevated recovery burden.
The estimate stays deliberately conservative and uses only published benchmarks, with the full methodology available on this site. It is a screening tool for practice managers and owners — useful for sizing the problem, not a substitute for a formal risk assessment or compliance review.
Healthcare downtime — common questions
Does this estimate include compliance or breach-related costs?
No. The calculator models operational downtime only — idled staff and interrupted revenue. Regulatory exposure, breach response, and notification costs are a separate (and often larger) category that requires its own assessment.
Why is the healthcare multiplier 1.3?
EHR-dependent workflows, appointment-driven revenue, and the documentation catch-up that follows every outage make downtime in healthcare more expensive than in a general office. The 1.3 multiplier reflects that while remaining conservative.
We have paper downtime procedures — should I still worry about IT outages?
Paper procedures keep patients safe, but they run slower, require re-entry into the EHR afterwards, and stall billing. Practices with good downtime procedures still lose productivity and revenue during outages — that residual cost is what this calculator estimates.
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