Health systems sit at the center of their communities.

When one goes down, everyone feels it. In this episode of Building Cyber Resilience in Health Care: A Leader’s Guide, Drex DeFord explains why downtime creates chaos beyond a single hospital. Nearby facilities feel the strain. Patient flow shifts. Staff stretch thinner. Communities absorb the shock. Drex draws a clear line leaders cannot ignore. Outages often last days or weeks. During that time, hospitals still operate, but under degraded conditions. Leaders must decide when capabilities drop, when emergency departments close, and how staffing changes. Those decisions don’t belong to IT alone anymore. CIOs, CTOs, CISOs, and boards now share responsibility for resilience. A reminder that cyber resilience means planning for how care continues when systems are down, not just how technology recovers. #cyberresilience #healthcareleadership #HospitalOperations #healthcarecybersecurity #healthit #patientcare