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When disruption hits a healthcare system, coordination becomes a race against time. But instead of a clear picture, teams often face conflicting details from different sites or outdated information that doesn’t match reality on the ground. Those misalignments turn small delays into problems that can threaten patient care.
Business continuity planning for multi-site healthcare organization can feel like managing a family of distant cousins: same last name, different households, each operating in their own way. Most days, that’s fine. The trouble starts when something goes wrong and those independent units need to move as one.
You’re doing the work. Your sites are trying. People send what they have, when they can. Yet every “Can we get a full facility view by noon?” request exposes the same uncomfortable truth: the pieces don’t add up to one clear picture.
The real enemy isn’t outdated documents; it’s fragmentation: multiple sites, multiple tools, different people updating their own versions, and no single source of truth.
Fragmented Facility Data Undermines Readiness Across Every Site
When DaVita, a nationwide dialysis provider, was hit with a major ransomware attack in 2025, the disruption didn’t spiral because the malware was exceptional. It spiraled because planning hadn’t integrated clinical operations, external vendors, and site-level dependencies into cohesive playbooks.
The SSRN investigation found the core vulnerability lay in inadequate coordination across the highly distributed environment: clinical workflows, third-party providers, and operational continuity requirements were not fully embedded in technical response processes. As a result, teams faced delays in communication and containment, struggling to quickly identify impacted pathways, activate workarounds, and manage supply and equipment interdependencies across sites.
DaVita’s case shows what fragmentation really costs: disrupted clinical workflows, delayed coordination, and heightened risk to patients who depend on uninterrupted dialysis care—all because planning stayed too IT-centric in a life-critical, multi-site operation.
62% of healthcare organizations struggle with data trapped in departmental silos driven by incompatible tools, mismatched formats, and older systems that don’t share information. When even basic operational details live in separate pockets, forming a consistent, system-wide picture becomes nearly impossible.
This kind of fragmentation costs the U.S. healthcare system over $30 billion a year. And the impact lands squarely in our world: if you can’t pull operational information together on a calm day, you won’t pull it together during a crisis.
Why Fragmented Data Becomes a 10× Bigger Problem in Healthcare
Healthcare isn’t built like most industries. It runs on layers of sites, service lines, specialties, vendors, and long-lived infrastructure that get stitched together over decades. Every layer adds another place where information can drift, fall out of sync, or hide in someone’s personal folder.
You see it in the little inconsistencies that pop up during routine work:
- A plan review turns into a debate because two sites use different recovery time objectives (RTO) for the same Electronic Health Record (EHR) module, each convinced theirs is “what IT approved.”
- A walk-through at one campus uncovers a newer floorplan taped to a wall that never made it back into the official file.
- A nursing manager updates a PoC list after a round of staff changes but forgets to send it to anyone outside her unit.
Site autonomy makes the gaps wider. Hospitals, clinics, specialty centers, and outpatient sites all update what they “own.” Healthcare runs fast, and people update what’s in front of them. But nobody owns the full picture.
Audits reveal how dire the issue is. Reviewers ask for a single, current picture of your critical processes, dependencies, and recovery steps. You produce it, but only after nights of reconciling competing documents from six places. The end result might look clean, but you know it took heroics to get there. The next audit will take the same effort unless the underlying fragmentation changes.
How BCMMetrics Brings Reliable Readiness and One Source of Truth to Every Site
Reliable readiness doesn’t come from running faster or asking people to “stay on top of updates.” It starts with one shared source of truth. When every site feeds the same place, the details stop drifting and the entire program finally moves as one.
That means a few things:
1. Location-based plan storage
Keep every site’s plans, documents, and details in one place, so you’re not chasing versions across inboxes, binders, and shared drives.
2. Consistent, templated plan formats
Standardize how sites capture RTOs, dependencies, and workflows, so you stop reconciling six different “styles” of the same plan.
3. Real-time PoC tracking
Update a contact once and push it everywhere it needs to go, eliminating the scramble for the “right list” when someone leaves or changes roles.
4. Version control with full history
Show who changed what, when, and why, so you can trust the plan you’re looking at and defend it during audits.
5. Centralized document management
Give each site a single place to store floorplans, equipment lists, vendor details, and site procedures.
6. Automatic plan-to-site assignment
Send approved plans straight to the correct location, so no one has to guess whether a clinic or campus is working from the right file.
7. Site-level exercise records
Capture what happened, what worked, and what didn’t at each site, so drills start feeding actual readiness.
8. Clear, system-wide reporting
Pull all the pieces together: plans, gaps, dependencies, PoCs, locations.
BCMMetrics gives healthcare teams the structure they rarely get, without slowing anyone down or forcing sites to change how they work. Once the data lives together, the whole program moves together.
Teams that switch to BCMMetrics often cut BIA time by up to 75% and reduce planning work by more than a third. And because the platform comes out of more than twenty-five years of MHA’s continuity consulting experience, it reflects how real healthcare organizations actually run. As one client put it, “Our data finally agrees with itself.”
If you want to see how that looks in practice, you can take a virtual tour or schedule a walkthrough of the platform.
FAQ
Why is facility data so hard to manage in multi-site healthcare systems?
Facility data is hard to manage in multi-site healthcare systems because each site updates what they own at their own pace. Healthcare moves quickly, staff rotate, units remodel or relocate, and changes don’t always make it back to a central place. Floorplans, PoC lists, equipment details, and recovery steps end up scattered across drives, emails, and personal folders. It’s not neglect—just a fragmented picture that’s hard to trust when you need it most.
Is fragmentation really a continuity problem, or just an IT/documentation issue?
Fragmentation is a continuity problem before it’s anything else. When information doesn’t line up, decisions slow down, recovery plans contradict each other, and teams lose time searching for basic facts. IT can secure systems, but BC teams still need a single, reliable view of how sites depend on those systems. Without that view, even a small incident can turn into a larger coordination problem.
How does fragmented data actually affect exercises or real incidents?
Fragmented data affects exercises and real incidents by creating mismatches and delays at the exact moment teams need clarity. Two departments show up with different plan versions. A PoC list is outdated. Dependencies don’t match what’s happening on the ground. Exercises stall, after-action reviews get messy, and in real incidents—like the DaVita ransomware case—patient care slows because teams can’t get a consistent operational picture fast enough.
What’s the simplest way to reduce fragmentation across sites?
The simplest way to reduce fragmentation is to give every site one central place to store and update critical information. Plans, floorplans, PoCs, dependencies, workflows, and exercise results all need to live in the same system. Once the information sits together, updates stop drifting, and the program finally behaves like one coordinated system instead of a collection of isolated sites.
How does BCMMetrics help if every site uses different formats and workflows today?
BCMMetrics helps by giving every site a shared structure to work within, without forcing them to change everything at once. Location-based storage, consistent templates, version control, real-time PoC updates, and unified dependency mapping gradually bring scattered information into alignment. Practitioners stop chasing versions, program owners get a trustworthy system-wide picture, and leadership finally sees a program that doesn’t rely on heroics to stay together.
