The February 2021 freeze taught North Texas a specific lesson: the building can lose power for days while the staff's homes, or a location across town, still have it. A practice in Richardson, Plano, or Frisco should plan for rolling, unpredictable outages rather than one clean closure.
What actually keeps a practice functioning:
- Remote access that works from day one. If providers and billers can reach the EMR securely from home, a dark office becomes a scheduling problem instead of a revenue stop. Test the remote setup in good weather.
- Cloud phones with failover rules. Lines should forward automatically to cell phones or a staffed remote queue, so patients rescheduling around the storm reach someone.
- UPS units sized for graceful shutdown. The goal of a battery is not to run the server through a two-day outage; it is to survive the surge-and-sag cycle of a failing grid and shut equipment down cleanly instead of corrupting the EMR database.
- A reopening checklist. Half the damage we see happens at power-on: surge-damaged switches, servers that did not come back, thermostat-driven pipe leaks over equipment. Know the power-on order and check the backup ran before resuming charting.