Ninety Days to Realign—or Fall Behind
Why the 2025 Guidelines are exposing every DIY system’s limits. SitRep #009.
When the AHA released the 2025 Guidelines, they did what they’ve always done: set new standards for education.
But here’s what they didn’t do—and never will.
They didn’t tell you how to update your website.
They didn’t tell you how to rebuild your booking pages, confirmation emails, or material delivery.
They didn’t explain how to keep your 2020 and 2025 sessions straight.
And that’s the point.
The AHA’s job is to write the rules of care.
It’s not their job to modernize your software or protect your business from chaos.
That gap between new science and daily operations—that’s where the pain lives.
The Hidden Cost of Every Guideline Update
Every five years the Guidelines evolve, and every five years instructors everywhere are left to figure it out alone.
Each gap that gets missed is lost time, lost revenue, and rising risk.
Legacy platforms sell “customization” as a feature, but “you can do it yourself” is deflection dressed as value.
Generic booking tools like Acuity or Calendly don’t even know this update happened—resuscitation is a niche inside millions of generic users.
So every provider now spends late nights rewriting course titles, descriptions, and emails—hoping renewals still point to the right place.
The AHA assumes you’re fine because technically you can still run classes through Atlas.
But Atlas is a filing portal, not a business platform.
Like the IRS, it receives the paperwork—it doesn’t run the operation.
So here we are again: a new set of standards, the same old scramble.
When the Entire Burden Lands on Your Desk
If you’re using a generic calendar tool or a legacy platform, the entire weight of this update sits on your desk.
You’re the one rewriting every touchpoint—course titles, descriptions, automations, renewal emails, instructor records.
You’re the one figuring out how to track which instructors are ready and rolling out the new courses.
You’re the one breaking it down for your team and hoping nothing slips through.
That isn’t modernization.
That’s unpaid IT work disguised as compliance.
This is where most owners default to DIY—and pay the tax with their time.
The DIY Delusion
Most providers started bootstrapped.
Trading time because they didn’t have cash to invest in systems.
But that habit turns into a delusion: if I do it all myself, I’ll own more of it.
It isn’t true.
Maintaining your own technical infrastructure to run an education business would be like every airline building its own airport, air-traffic control, and security checkpoints.
They don’t—because shared, purpose-built infrastructure gives everyone a standardized experience customers trust.
When the travel industry shares infrastructure, more people fly.
When the home delivery industry shares infrastructure, more people order.
When CPR training shares infrastructure, more people will learn.
This is the wake-up call the industry should have gotten years ago:
you’re not supposed to carry the system on your back.
When tax law changes, TurboTax updates.
When aviation standards shift, flight-deck software updates before the next takeoff.
In CPR training, you still rebuild everything by hand.
That’s not professionalism—that’s a lack of infrastructure.
What Real Infrastructure Looks Like
Platforms built on standards adapt automatically when those standards change.
That’s the difference.
At Hovn, every AHA course—BLS, ACLS, PALS, Heartsaver, Instructor Updates—has already been versioned.
2020 and 2025 live side by side.
Rosters, cards, renewals, and search data all map to the correct guideline.
When you switch the catalog, classes and reminders stay clean.
Updates go live across your entire network at once, with identifiers that show exactly who has migrated.
Your system stays up-to-date while you focus on your business.
No copy-pasting.
No spreadsheets.
No “hope we updated everything.”
You migrate once, and the platform evolves with the science.
The same approach will apply when ARC and HSI release their updates—version parity, clean migrations, and network-wide alignment.
Ninety Days to Realign—or Fall Behind
Here’s the clock you’re up against.
The official transition began October 22, 2025.
Instructor Updates are due February 28, 2026.
The full switch happens March 1, 2026.
That’s ninety days for the industry to realign.
If your systems can’t track versions or automate renewals to the new guidelines, you’re already behind.
If your network runs on generic booking tools, shared drives, and spreadsheets, you’ll be chasing errors until summer.
If every training site and instructor has their own way of updating, chaos compounds.
Verify these dates in AHA communications and set your internal deadlines now.
The question isn’t “Can I survive this update?”
It’s “Do I want to keep doing this on my own?”
The Reset Moment
This is your reset moment.
You can keep patching old systems that turn every update into a manual rebuild,
or you can move to infrastructure that adapts with the guidelines.
The AHA did its job—it set the new standards.
Now ask whether your software can meet them without breaking your business.
Run the Audit. End the Cycle.
Before you spend another week re-authoring courses, sit down with us for a 30-minute software audit.
Because this isn’t about the 2025 update.
It’s about ending the cycle of doing it all yourself.
Stop rebuilding. Start running on standards.
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