Hospital Corporation of America, which runs 165 hospitals and 115 freestanding surgery centers in 20 states, has experienced a glitch that led to the shutdown of some of its electronic health record system.
How big is this EHR outage? The extent is not immediately clear. There were reports of problems being isolated to Florida. But other reports noted problems on the East Coast, too.
One source said the shutdown was tied to a hardware problem, possibly a storage area network.
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According to an industry insider, a “fatal corruption” began at 4 am Saturday morning and the EMR network was still down as of Monday morning.
Update Although HCA did not immediately respond to requests for comment as this post was published, it subsequently emailed a statement confirming that a hardware storage issue was behind the shutdown.
We’ll keep updating with this or other posts as we get more information (if you’ve heard anything, drop me a line).
News started to trickle out this morning when Mandi Bishop, Dell Health’s Analytics Solutions Lead, noted the outage in a tweet:
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Anyone know why HCA entire #EHR network on eastern seaboard went down – and still down- this AM? They went paperless… #HITsm #hcsm #hcldr
— Mandi Bishop (@MandiBPro) December 7, 2015
The outage raises serious questions about how hospitals are balancing the need to digitize their medical records with sufficient training for staff when nightmare scenarios like an extended shutdown occur.
As Bishop noted in a post for EMR & HIPAA, what’s especially concerning is that some hospital staff are facing these situations without the experience of using paper records. It also raises questions about patient safety.
We can’t completely classify this EHR shutdown until we know its scope. But it calls to mind other health systems that have had to cope with EHR system shutdowns, such as MedStar.
In April, Politico reported that Medstar’s outpatient clinics in the Washington, D.C., and Baltimore area lost access to their EHRs for two days when the GE Centricity EHR system crashed. It said the system went offline for scheduled maintenance on Friday and had come back on Monday when it suffered a “severe” malfunction.
Boston Children’s Hospital experienced a hardware glitch tied to storage over a four day period in March. Clinicians had to rely on paper and pen to track treatment, order tests, and drugs, and receive test results, the Boston Globe reported. It noted that digital imaging, patient registration, and scheduling were unaffected.
Boulder Community Hospital in Colorado shared some of the lessons it learned from an EMR outage that lasted 10 days on the news site, Healthcare Informatics. The post noted one of things hospitals tend not to prepare for are outages that last more than a couple of days. Another is when patient data is lost in the process.
BJC HealthCare experienced an outage in July that shut down its electronic health records and scheduling systems across 13 hospitals in Illinois and Missouri for 20 hours. The hospitals coped with it by recording data by hand and cutting back on patients it transferred from other hospitals.
Photo: BigStock Photos
