CRISC Risk Response and Reporting Practice Question
A hospital network is selecting key risk indicators (KRIs) for its electronic health record (EHR) availability risk. The risk committee wants indicators that will provide early warning before an outage affects patient care. Which TWO of the following are the most appropriate KRIs for this purpose? (Choose two.)
⚠ Common exam trap
The trap here is choosing familiar operational metrics such as downtime minutes or change counts, which are lagging or activity-based, instead of forward-looking indicators of degrading resilience.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Percentage of critical EHR servers whose monitoring alerts were unacknowledged beyond the response threshold
Replication lag exceeding threshold and unacknowledged critical alerts are leading indicators that measure current degradation of resilience and response capability, giving the risk committee time to intervene before patients are affected. Downtime minutes, long-term MTBF, and raw change volume describe past events or activity levels without predictive value for imminent EHR availability risk, so they do not serve as early-warning KRIs.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Total number of change requests submitted for the EHR environment during the past quarter
Why it's wrong here
Change volume alone is not a risk indicator; changes are a normal part of maintaining and improving the EHR. Without context about failure rates, emergency changes, or rollback frequency, raw volume does not signal increasing availability risk. A high number of well-tested changes may be safer than a few poorly controlled ones, so this metric does not provide the early warning the committee requested.
- ✓
Percentage of critical EHR servers whose monitoring alerts were unacknowledged beyond the response threshold
Why this is correct
Unacknowledged critical alerts indicate that the operations team is not responding to emerging failures within the agreed time. This is a leading indicator because it predicts that a real incident may go undetected or untreated long enough to cause downtime. Measuring the percentage beyond threshold gives a normalized, trendable KRI that directly reflects operational readiness to protect EHR availability.
- ✗
Mean time between failures (MTBF) of the EHR application servers over the trailing twelve months
Why it's wrong here
MTBF is a historical reliability statistic computed over a long period. It describes past performance of the server fleet rather than current, actionable degradation. A twelve-month MTBF can look healthy even while a specific component is failing this week, so it lacks the timeliness needed for early warning. It is useful for capacity and lifecycle planning but not as a leading KRI for imminent availability risk.
- ✓
Percentage of EHR database replication lag exceeding the defined threshold over the past 24 hours
Why this is correct
Replication lag is a leading indicator of availability risk because it measures how far the standby database trails the primary. If the primary fails while lag is high, failover can lose data or fail entirely, directly threatening patient care. Tracking the percentage of time lag exceeds threshold gives the risk committee an early warning that resilience is degrading before an actual outage occurs.
- ✗
Number of EHR downtime minutes recorded during the previous quarter
Why it's wrong here
Quarterly downtime minutes are a lagging indicator: they report outages that already happened and affected patients. While valuable for trend analysis and post-incident review, they cannot provide early warning because the harm has already occurred. The risk committee asked specifically for indicators that signal trouble before an outage, so this metric does not meet the stated purpose.
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Written and reviewed by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
Last reviewed September 2026 · checked against the official ISACA exam blueprint
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