Healthcare cyber crisis exercise: aligning your organisation with the CaRE programme

🚨 A crisis exercise in the healthcare sector

In healthcare, the ability to withstand a cyber-attack is directly tied to continuity of care. When the IT system goes down, it is not just screens that turn off: patient records become unreachable, surgeries are postponed, labs grind to a halt, and emergency rooms have to improvise on paper.

Managing a cyber crisis effectively is not just about documents. It is about organisation, coordination and shared reflexes, and those reflexes can only be built through practice.

The CaRE programme and the expectations of domain 2

The CaRE programme (Cybersécurité, Accélération et Résilience des Établissements), led by the French Ministry of Health and the ANS, structures the national cyber-resilience strategy for healthcare providers. Its domain 2 sets out two operational priorities:

1. Ensure business continuity and recovery (BCP / DRP), so that patient care does not stop with the IT system.
2. Build secure backups, so the organisation can restart from a clean baseline after an attack, particularly ransomware.

These priorities are not checkbox items: they only have value when they are tested under degraded conditions, with the right people, the right procedures, and a communication channel that still works when AD, email or IP telephony are compromised.

What PanicSafe brings to domain 2 of CaRE

PanicSafe, our AI-augmented crisis management platform, addresses these priorities head-on with a core set of features:

• Virtual crisis cell that can be activated in seconds, fully independent from the compromised IT system.
• Secure communications between executives, the CISO, the CIO, the medical coordinator, communications, and the supervisory authorities (regional health agency, ANS, data protection authority, prosecutor’s office).
• Pre-approved playbooks (ransomware, patient data leak, EHR outage, telephony attack, etc.), accessible even when the intranet is unreachable.
• Time-stamped traceability of every decision, communication and action: essential evidence for regulators and post-crisis reviews under CaRE.
• Dedicated BCP / DRP workspaces to execute fail-overs, track recovery milestones and coordinate technical teams with clinical services.

PanicSafe also lets you prepare and rehearse these mechanisms outside the IT system, as part of the crisis exercises required by CaRE and ANSSI.

👉 Outcome: less improvisation, more control… and stronger compliance.

What does a CaRE-aligned exercise actually look like?

An effective exercise alternates scenario play (a realistic situation, e.g. a cryptolocker hitting the EHR on a Friday evening) with observation (who decides what, in which order, with which degraded tools). Items to validate:

• Activation time of the crisis cell outside the compromised IT system.
• Decision quorum: executives, CISO, CIO, medical coordinator, communications, legal.
• Patient and family communications, with pre-approved templates signed off by the comms team.
• Regulatory notifications: regional health agency within 24h, data-protection authority within 72h when health data is exposed, criminal complaint.
• BCP fail-over of critical activities (emergency, surgery, pharmacy, lab).
• Backup posture: restore tests, immutable backups, logical and physical isolation.
• After-action review, documented and shareable with regulators, feeding the next iteration.

Are you part of the CaRE programme?

If your organisation is enrolled in the CaRE programme, or if you want to align with its BCP / DRP requirements, let’s talk about a tabletop scenario tailored to your context: size of the organisation, criticality of activities, maturity of the teams.

👉 Book a PanicSafe demo to see the platform run on a real-world healthcare scenario, with your own stakeholders.