Many care facilities have grown quietly dependent on a single internet line. Cloud-based EMR systems, eFax, voice over IP phones, pharmacy ordering, telehealth, e-prescribing and cloud backups all stop working when that line does. A backhoe cutting a fiber cable down the road can leave a building unable to chart.
Whether you need a second connection depends on how much of your operation relies on the internet and how long you could tolerate an outage. Here is a framework for deciding.
List the services that would stop or slow down:
EMR/EHR, such as cloud-hosted platforms
Medication management and pharmacy connections
Phones and fax, if delivered over the internet
Email and cloud documents
Time clock and payroll systems
Telehealth visits
Security cameras with cloud storage
Remote support tools used by your IT provider
Resident and guest Wi-Fi, which may not be critical but generates complaints
Then rate each one. Which would put residents at risk, which would delay billing, and which would be an inconvenience?
You do not need exact figures. Consider the questions:
How long can staff operate on paper before documentation errors and safety risks climb?
What happens to admissions, orders and physician communication during an outage?
What would catch-up charting cost in overtime?
Are there regulatory or contractual obligations tied to uptime?
Compare this reasoning with the monthly cost of a backup circuit. For many facilities with cloud EMRs, the comparison favors redundancy.
Two connections are not necessarily redundant. Check these points.
Two lines from the same company often share equipment upstream, so one outage can take down both.
A second line that enters the building through the same conduit or the same pole is vulnerable to the same cut. Better combinations include:
Fiber plus cable
Cable plus fixed wireless
Fiber plus cellular or satellite-based backup
In rural parts of Oklahoma, Texas and Arkansas, options may be limited, so ask providers and your IT partner what is truly available at your address.
The equipment at your edge, usually a firewall or router, must detect failure and switch traffic automatically. A backup that requires someone to drive in and plug a cable is not much help at 2 a.m.
A cellular backup may not carry full load. Decide which services get priority during failover, such as EMR, phones and eFax first, with guest Wi-Fi limited or paused.
If your phone system is delivered over the internet, an outage may silence it. Plan for:
Automatic call forwarding to cell phones or another location
A traditional line or cellular backup for emergencies
Clear instructions so staff know how to call 911 and families can reach the facility
Test this. Many organizations discover during a real outage that forwarding was never set up.
Redundancy is more than a second line:
Power: Internet equipment needs battery backup, and ideally generator support, so outages do not take it down along with the building's power.
Core equipment: A single firewall or switch is a single point of failure.
Monitoring: You should know a link is down before staff tell you. Alerts for each circuit give the IT team a head start.
Provider support: Know who to call, what your contracted repair times are, and what your service-level agreement actually promises.
Once a backup is installed, test it. Unplug the primary connection during a controlled window, confirm that failover works and that critical systems keep running, then fail back. Repeat periodically. Include downtime procedures in your emergency preparedness planning, since CMS requirements for long-term care facilities expect plans that address a range of hazards.
If your EMR, phones and eFax are all cloud-based, and a day offline would seriously disrupt care, a second connection from a different provider with automatic failover is usually worth pricing.
If most systems are on-site and the internet is mainly for email, a lower-cost cellular backup may be enough.
In either case, document the plan and test it.
UnityCare IT helps care organizations evaluate circuits, design failover and configure monitoring. If you are unsure how an outage would play out at your facility, we can walk through it with you.
Call or text: 405-285-3845
New customers: start@unitycareit.com
Existing customers: support@unitycareit.com
Address: UnityCare Technologies, 2524 N Broadway Ste 554, PMB 947974, Edmond, Oklahoma 73034-4172