Episode 112 -- When the EHR Goes Dark: Patient Safety Meets Cybersecurity Governance
In Episode 112 of the Cybersecurity Readiness Podcast Series, Dr. Dave Chatterjee is joined by Dr. Mark Yoffe, a board-certified internal medicine physician who has also built deep expertise in cybersecurity, to examine a question most healthcare organizations have not fully reckoned with: what actually happens to patient care when the electronic health record goes dark. Dr. Chatterjee opens with a sobering scenario — a nurse unable to confirm whether a cardiac patient's anticoagulant was administered overnight because the EHR is degraded, resulting in a double dose — and notes that variations of this scenario have occurred during real ransomware attacks and extended downtime events, even though most healthcare organizations have not mapped which clinical dependencies fail first or pre-assigned who decides what when systems cannot be trusted.
Dr. Yoffe, who bridges internal medicine and information security, explains how the same words — confidentiality, integrity, availability — carry weight in both professions, and walks through what actually happens on the floor when digital systems go down: clinicians shift from an "information push" environment, where alerts and updates come to them, to an "information pull" environment, where they must actively seek out information, usually from other humans, because the chart itself can no longer be trusted. The conversation moves through the compensatory mechanisms hospitals fall back on — written charts, physical examination, and the judgment clinicians rely on when information is incomplete — and into how security professionals can translate technical metrics like uptime into the language leadership and clinicians actually understand: patient care and mission impact.
Analyzed throughout the episode through Dr. Chatterjee's Commitment–Preparedness–Discipline (CPD) Framework, the discussion also tackles the distinct governance challenge posed by AI in healthcare — a tool that, unlike a scalpel or a hammer, is never quite the same tool twice — and closes with a shared conviction that preparation is not a once-a-year tabletop exercise but a daily discipline that determines how clinicians and organizations perform when systems, and stakes, are at their worst.
To access and download the entire podcast summary with discussion highlights - https://www.dchatte.com/episode-112-when-the-ehr-goes-dark-patient-safety-meets-cybersecurity-governance/
Connect with Host Dr. Dave Chatterjee
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dchatte/
Website: https://dchatte.com/
Books Published
Cybersecurity Readiness: A Holistic and High-Performance Approach
Articles & Cases Published
Chatterjee, D. (2026). The Cryptographic Reckoning: Why Quantum Readiness Begins with Agility, Not Algorithms, The INFORMS Analytics Magazine, June 26, 2026
Chatterjee, D. (2026). The New Digital Fragility: How AI-Enhanced Cyber Threats Are Reshaping Operational Resilience, The INFORMS Analytics Magazine, March 4, 2026
Chatterjee, D. (2026). Root: Automating the Remediation Gap, Ivey Publishing, Jan 7, 2026.
Chatterjee, D. and Leslie, A. (2024). “Ignorance is not bliss: A human-centered whole-of-enterprise approach to cybersecurity preparedness,” Business Horizons, Accepted on Oct 29, 2024.
Chatterjee, D. (2023). “Mission critical – How American Cancer Society successfully and securely migrated to the cloud amid the pandemic,” I by IMD, March 13, 2023.
Chatterjee, D. (2022). “Preventing security breaches must start at the top,” I by IMD, September 28, 2022, Institute for Management Development, Lausanne, Switzerland
Benz, M. and Chatterjee, D. (2020). “Calculated Risk? A Cybersecurity Evaluation Tool for SMEs,” Business Horizons, available online from May 4, 2020
Chatterjee, D. (2019). “Should Executives Go To Jail Over Cyber Attacks,” Journal of Organizational Computing and Electronic Commerce, Vol 29, Issue 1, pp. 1-3.
Abraham, C., Chatterjee, D., and Sims, R. (2019). “Muddling through cybersecurity: Insights from the U.S. healthcare industry,” Business Horizons, July 2019.
