On April 28, ShelterZoom launched its Spare Tire platform and named a category: zero-downtime continuity. The idea breaks from backup and disaster recovery, which both assume the system fails and you race to restore it. Spare Tire keeps clinicians working when the EHR goes dark. The timing is not abstract. In 2026 a ransomware attack closed all 35 University of Mississippi Medical Center clinics, and a separate attack put Brockton Hospital on paper for two weeks.
67%
of healthcare organizations were hit by ransomware in 2024, nearly double the 2021 rate of 34%. Prevention spending is no longer the variable that decides the outcome. Continuity during the attack is.
Source: Sophos, State of Ransomware 2024.
Mississippi’s only academic medical center lost its Epic EHR, phone lines, and IT network to a ransomware attack. By end of day, all 35 clinics across the state had closed. Surgeries and elective procedures were canceled, chemotherapy patients were turned away, and clinicians fell back to pen and paper. The FBI surged resources into the investigation, and restoration ran for weeks.
Sources: UMMC public statements; FBI; press reporting, February 2026.
Healthcare orgs hit by ransomware in 2024 (Sophos)
67%
Total US healthcare records breached in 2024
276.8M
Average ransomware breach lifecycle
320 days
Estimated Medicare patient deaths from ransomware (2016–21)
42–67
Ransom payments covered by cyber insurance
47%
UMMC
Feb
2026
Weeks
Epic down, 35 clinics closed
Brockton (Signature Healthcare)
April
2026
~2 Weeks
Paper charting, ambulances diverted (Anubis)
Ascension Health
May
2024
~28 days
$1.1B FY24 loss / 5.6M records
Kaiser Permanente
April
2024
No EHR DT
13.4M (tracking-pixel exposure)
Sources: HIPAA Journal; FBI/CISA; SEC filings; company disclosures.
The close: Ascension’s attack did not bypass world-class security. It exploited the universal failure mode. When the primary system goes down, operations stop. Spare Tire is built so they don’t.
Having lived through a 23-day ransomware outage at a previous organization, I can say the industry's reliance on paper downtime procedures is fundamentally broken. Within 24 hours, paper processes collapsed. It ultimately took us seven months to re-enter and reconcile that data. Zero-downtime continuity is not just an IT improvement, it's an operational and patient safety imperative.
Spare Tire Healthcare. Live at launch. Zero clinical downtime during EHR outages, running on a separate, independent cloud and integrated over HL7.
AWS. Spare Tire is planned for availability in AWS Marketplace, with BAA-ready deployment for healthcare. Hector Rodriguez, security leader for Healthcare and Life Sciences at AWS, is on record on the platform’s continuity approach.
Mithra AI
If Spare Tire is the continuity foundation for clinical and business operations, Mithra AI is the trust, security, and governance layer for the AI era. Public launch July 2026. It eliminates shadow AI, prevents hallucinations and data leakage, detects compromised AI agents, and makes every output verifiable and traceable.
74%
of legacy DR and backup systems fail after recovery because contaminated data syncs right back in. Spare Tire’s CyberVault validation is built to remove that failure mode.
Source: ShelterZoom (CEO statement, launch).
What it is. A lightweight clinical workspace that runs continuously on a separate, independent cloud, holding a synchronized slice of the data hospitals need to keep treating patients when the primary EHR is unreachable. Always running, always current, architecturally separated from the systems it protects. Epic, Oracle Cerner, and MEDITECH have each recommended it to customers.
01 Normal operations
The primary EHR runs as usual. Spare Tire runs in parallel on its own cloud and syncs the last four weeks of patient data over HL7: active medications, allergies, ICD-10 diagnoses, recent vitals, care team, bed status. The sync is invisible during normal operation.
02 Downtime hits
Ransomware, an outage, a vendor failure, or a planned upgrade makes the primary EHR unreachable. The independent cloud is unaffected, because it runs on different hardware, in a different network, with different credentials.
03 Spare Tire active
Clinicians open a separate application on an IT-cleared device, on web or mobile. They view recent history, write notes, order and verify medications, record vitals, and manage beds. Every action is timestamped with a full audit trail.
04 Recovery and sync
Before any record flows back, CyberVault validates the returning EHR data for ransomware signatures and corruption. Once the primary is confirmed clean, everything created during downtime syncs back automatically. No manual re-entry. The connection to the EHR is a read-only HL7 integration in normal operation. Lateral movement from a compromised hospital domain has nowhere to go.
Why hospitals keep getting shut down. A walk-through of the UMMC attack and the recurring downtime pattern. Zentera, March 2026.
1
Why hospitals keep getting shut down. A walk-through of the UMMC attack and the recurring downtime pattern.
Zentera, March 2026.
2
Two weeks on paper. Brockton Hospital’s Anubis ransomware downtime, in detail.
HIPAA Journal, April 2026.
3
State of Ransomware 2024. The 67% figure in full context, with payment and recovery data.
Sophos.
Walk through the four phases on your own EHR and downtime scenario.
