Most practices underestimate what downtime costs them, because they think about it as an IT problem. It is not. When the EMR is unreachable or the network is down, the practice stops: patients wait, providers cannot chart, billing stalls, and staff burn the day on workarounds. The IT is just the trigger. The cost is everything downstream.
The number is bigger than it feels
Industry estimates put the average cost of IT downtime for small and mid-size businesses in the thousands of dollars per hour, with commonly cited figures around 8,000 dollars per hour. For a medical practice the mechanics are specific and easy to picture: every hour the schedule is frozen is an hour of appointments not seen and billable work not done, plus the staff time spent coping and the patient goodwill spent apologizing. If your practice generates a few hundred dollars an hour in billable care, even a half-day outage is a real number, and the hidden costs of rescheduling and recovery push it higher.
The costs you do not see on the invoice
The direct revenue loss is only part of it. Downtime also costs staff overtime to catch up, delayed billing that slows cash flow, and something harder to measure: patient confidence. A patient who sits in a waiting room while the system is down, or who cannot get a result or a callback, remembers it. In a competitive market, reputation is not a soft cost.
Ransomware turns hours into weeks
There is a version of downtime that is far worse than a bad afternoon. A ransomware incident or a failed system without a tested backup does not resolve in hours. Recovery is measured in days for a prepared practice and in weeks or months for an unprepared one. That is the scenario that closes practices. It is worth noting that a large share of small businesses that suffer a major data loss do not survive the following months.
Downtime is a design decision, not bad luck
Here is the part practices miss: the amount of downtime you experience is largely determined in advance, by how the environment is built. Tested backups, a documented recovery plan, redundancy where it matters, proactive monitoring that catches problems before they cascade, and fast support all shrink both how often you go down and how long you stay down. Downtime is not simply bad luck. It is the predictable output of the choices made before the outage.
How Galleon reduces it
We design for the recovery, not just the backup. Tested backups on a real schedule, documented recovery procedures, proactive monitoring, and an initial response within 15 minutes per our SLA all exist to make downtime rare and short. We have restored practices from ransomware without paying the ransom and without losing records, which is the ultimate test of whether the plan was real.
If you do not know what an hour of downtime costs your practice, or whether your backups have ever been tested, that is the place to start. Explore our Backup and Disaster Recovery service, take the free IT Risk Assessment, or schedule a discovery call.