Strengthening Enterprise Resilience Through Business Continuity Planning

How we helped a national healthcare services organization build an enterprise-wide business continuity plan, replacing informal workarounds with structured, scenario-specific response procedures across eight major departments.

Client

A national healthcare services organization provides physician staffing to hospitals across the United States, with a particularly strong presence in the Southeast. The organization often sends physicians to supplement a hospital’s existing team during periods of high demand or staffing shortages.

This model means the organization sits at the intersection of its own corporate infrastructure and the clinical environments of dozens of hospital partners. If something disrupts the organization’s internal systems, it can affect hundreds of physicians across dozens of sites. And if something goes wrong at one of its affiliated hospitals, the ripple effects flow right back into the organization’s operations. That kind of complexity made enterprise-wide continuity planning essential.

Challenge

a group of people walking through a building

Navigating a Complex Operating Model

Because the organization’s physicians work inside hospital systems that the organization does not own or control, its continuity risk profile is layered in ways most companies never have to think about. If a partner hospital’s electronic health records platform goes offline, for example, that directly impacts how the organization’s physicians deliver care, document patient encounters, and generate revenue. On the other hand, a disruption to the organization’s own internal platforms for payroll, communications, or credentialing can leave those same physicians without the support they need to do their jobs.

Gaps the Organization Needed to Address

Leadership recognized several vulnerabilities that had developed as the company grew. Emergency communication had become decentralized, so if a critical system went down, there was no reliable way to reach every affected physician and staff member quickly. On top of that, awareness of backup information repositories was limited.

There was also heavy reliance on a small number of technology platforms and third-party vendors, but the organization had limited visibility into how resilient those vendors were. In some cases, leadership discovered that key processes were being managed by just one person, which is a significant concentration of risk on its own regardless of any broader continuity concerns.

What the organization needed was a structured, enterprise-wide framework that could replace the patchwork of informal workarounds and hold up under real-world pressure.

Approach

Starting with Discovery

The engagement began with identifying the right internal champion to lead the effort. This meant finding someone who could coordinate across departments, align priorities, and keep the process moving. With that leadership in place, the EisnerAmper team worked on a comprehensive Business Impact Analysis (BIA) across eight major departments, including Human Resources, Compliance, Enterprise Management, Finance, Accounting, Growth & Innovation, Legal, and Operations.

Through one-on-one and group interviews with each department, the team documented every critical function. They mapped out which systems each team relied on, who managed each process, what third-party and fourth-party vendors were involved, and how long each function could tolerate a disruption before operations were meaningfully affected.

The Value of an Outside Perspective

One of the most valuable aspects of the process was simply having an external team ask the right questions. Internal teams are often so embedded in their day-to-day work that it’s difficult for them to step back and articulate what they do, let alone identify what could go wrong. An outside perspective made it possible to pull out critical details that would have otherwise gone undocumented, because the information was so routine that people didn’t think to mention it on their own.

Building the Continuity Plan

With the BIA complete, the team turned each department’s risk profile into actionable continuity procedures. These were scenario-specific playbooks developed in close partnership with the people who would need to execute them.

For the clinical operations team, that meant establishing paper charting protocols in case electronic health records go offline. The plan checked to see if paper charts were stocked at every location, training physicians on how to use them and designating a runner at each site to collect completed charts at the end of each day so the organization can continue to bill. For the payroll team, it meant developing a workaround with their banking partner so that if the payroll platform becomes unavailable on a pay cycle, the operating account can duplicate the prior period’s payments. This would allow employees to still get paid on time, and any variances would be reconciled on the next check.

The final deliverable was a comprehensive continuity booklet that ranked the organization’s top risk areas by severity and paired each one with its corresponding response plan.

Empowering Leadership and Teams

Beyond the documentation itself, the process helped the organization designate continuity leaders for each department. These are the people who would be responsible for activating the plan when something goes wrong, and having named individuals with clear responsibilities means there is no ambiguity about who takes charge in a real disruption.

The continuity booklet was also designed to be accessible across the entire organization, so that anyone from a frontline physician to a back-office administrator can quickly look up what to do in each scenario.

Results

The engagement produced tangible, lasting improvements to the organization’s overall resilience.

Perhaps most importantly, the process gave the organization confidence in knowing how to act when something goes wrong, and the entire organization has a shared understanding of how to respond.

A comprehensive enterprise-wide Business Continuity Plan (BCP) that aligns all eight major departments under one cohesive strategy document.

Strengthened emergency communication readiness through a recommended centralized notification protocol that incorporates mass notification tools, backup hotlines, annual training, and routine testing.

Improved awareness and use of backup information repositories so that team members across the organization know exactly where to find critical data during a system outage.

Greater visibility into vendor resilience, along with a recommended process for requesting and evaluating business continuity plans from critical third-party partners.

A framework for ongoing scenario testing that includes structured exercises simulating major outages or cyber events, which helps validate readiness and build organizational confidence in the plan over time.

a doctor using a stethoscope to check a patient's pulse

Prepare Your Organization for What’s Next

EisnerAmper’s Business Continuity Planning services help organizations of all sizes and industries develop practical, tailored resilience strategies. That includes everything from initial Business Impact Analysis through full continuity plan development, tabletop exercises, and ongoing program support.

Whether you’re starting from scratch or looking to strengthen an existing program, our team brings the experience, structure, and outside perspective to help you build a plan. Visit our Business Continuity Plan Services page to learn more and connect with our team:

Business Continuity Plan Services

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Discover how a structured approach can help bring clarity, consistency, and confidence to complex challenges. Ready to move forward? Connect with our team to start the conversation.