North Texas spring storm season brings exactly the power behavior that kills practice IT: not clean outages but flickers, sags, and surges, often several in one afternoon. Each one is a chance to corrupt an EMR database write or cook a switch.
What gets protected, in order:
- Servers and network storage: a UPS with enough runtime to ride through flickers and perform an automatic clean shutdown in a real outage. Database corruption from hard power loss is a recovery project; a clean shutdown is a non-event.
- The network core: firewall, switches, wireless controllers. If the network core stays up through a flicker, cloud EMR sessions survive it too, and nobody re-logs into anything.
- Workstations attached to clinical hardware: imaging capture, lab interfaces, signature pads mid-document. A mid-write power hit on an imaging workstation can mean a repeated procedure.
- Everything else gets quality surge protection at minimum, and the building's panel-level protection is worth a conversation with your electrician.
The maintenance nobody does: UPS batteries age out in roughly three to five years, and a dead battery turns the unit into an expensive power strip. Battery checks belong on the same calendar as backup restore tests; both exist for the same bad afternoon.