A 180-bed regional hospital in the Midwest lost its EMR at 2:14 a.m. on a Tuesday. The night-shift charge nurse noticed first — the Cerner terminal froze, came back to a lock screen she didn't recognize, then went black. By 2:40, the entire fourth floor was on paper. By 3:15, the ED was running on whiteboards and memory. Nurses were walking lab results between floors because the pneumatic tube system's controller had also gone down — it ran on the same network segment. The CIO told me later that the part that shook him wasn't the ransomware demand. It was watching his team revert to procedures none of them had practiced since nursing school. He said it felt like watching an episode of Pitt, except the cameras weren't rolling and nobody was going to yell cut. He wasn't being dramatic. If you've watched Pitt — the Max series set in a Pittsburgh trauma center — you've seen what happens when a hospital's digital infrastructure disappears. Systems go dark. Staff improvise.…