“I think everything we’ve asked for, I can’t think of one thing that hasn’t come to fruition to this point. Sometimes it may take a little longer because there’s a lot to it to build or create, but I can’t think of a time where Juvare said, ‘No, we can’t do that.’” – Mike Kubitza, Regional Safety Director, Penn Medicine, University of Pennsylvania Health System
As one of the largest academic health systems in the Philadelphia region, spanning seven acute care hospitals and more than 60,000 employees, Penn Medicine faced a significant challenge: a business continuity program still in its early stages, with fragmented downtime procedures, no standardized business impact analysis (BIA) process, and tools that weren’t built for healthcare workflows.
“A lot of times, there was nothing — no procedure at all. And if there was anything, most of the time it was really old or really didn’t have a lot of context to it and needed updating,” said Mike Kubitza, Regional Safety Manager and Corporate Business Continuity Manager at Penn Medicine.
When the CrowdStrike outage hit in July 2024 — what Kubitza describes as “probably the closest thing you can get to a ransomware event without having one” — it underscored the urgency of having a mature, scalable program in place.
“Between using Juvare for their emergency notification, their alerting capabilities, and talking with them on what they can do with business continuity, we felt like they were the best fit to make an all-in-one system for us.”– Mike Kubitza, Regional Safety Director, Penn Medicine, University of Pennsylvania Health System
Penn Medicine turned to Juvare’s WebEOC platform, customizing it to create a single streamlined workflow for end users, branded communications tools under the Penn Medicine name, application-mapping dashboards, and a BIA cloning feature to accelerate department-level completion.
The result: over 300 BIAs completed in a single fiscal year, with full inpatient coverage in progress.
