Hospital Computer Crashs Show EHR Vulnerabilities; Need for Better Explanations

A recent EHR crash atSutter Health was managed in about the same (ineffective) way as most of the other similar health system disruptions. Sutter disclosed little about what was happening during and after the crash. The outage was discussed in a recent article (see:How a Major Computer Crash Showed the Vulnerabilities of EHRs). Below is an excerpt from it:The...[recent] communications outage at Sutter Health, the largest health system in northern California, which cut off access to electronic health records (EHRs), highlighted the frequency of such outages and the need for backup plans and drills nationwide (see:Sutter Health fixes systemwide computer failure, launches investigation). The outage started at about 10:30 PM May 14 and lasted more than 24 hours, until Sutter announced systems were up and running at 2 AM May 16. During the shutdown, some elective surgeries were rescheduled, some procedures were delayed, and some patients were discharged. The 24-hospital health system executed its downtime plan and reverted to paper-based charts.....Sutter spokesperson Dean Fryer told the San Francisco Chronicle that the cause for activation of the system was not a fire or data breach but did not disclose details. Fryer told Medscape Medical News he would have no further comment beyond the May 16 update.First of all, let me speculate about why I think that health systems tend not to be forthcoming about their EHR disruptions. First and early in the process, the cause of the c...
Source: Lab Soft News - Category: Laboratory Medicine Authors: Tags: Electronic Health Record (EHR) Healthcare Information Technology Medical Consumerism Medicolegal Issues Quality of Care Source Type: blogs