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Episode 216

Female Founders Series: When the EHR Goes Down: Building Real-Time Resilience Before the Next Outage

Aug 18, 2026
32:14

Episode Description

When the EHR goes down, care doesn't stop, but the chart, the meds, and the allergies do. Chao Cheng Shorland explains why EHR downtime is a patient safety problem, not just an IT one, and how her team is working to end pen-and-paper charting during outages.

In this conversation:

  • Why EHR downtime belongs under patient safety, and how mortality risk climbs when systems go dark
  • The difference between continuity during failure and disaster recovery after failure
  • How ransomware turned downtime from a two-hour event into a 24-day average
  • What a lightweight downtime system needs to do: charting, orders, medications, ADT, and ED tracking with no user training
  • How a passive, read-only system flips to active over HL7 and syncs back when the primary EHR returns

Chao Cheng-Shorland, CEO and Co-Founder, ShelterZoom

Megan Antonelli, Chief Executive Officer, HealthIMPACT Live

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