
Due to Friday’s worldwide computer outage, some large U.S. hospitals were forced to postpone procedures and medical appointments.
Hospital employees in Boston and New York said that numerous operating rooms had been closed, making it difficult for them to locate critically ill patients or to obtain certain medical information.
“We can arrange our resources every day since we have a really well-mapped out plan,” a staff member of a hospital system in New York City that was impacted remarked. The staff member, who wished to remain anonymous because they lacked the authority to speak on behalf of the healthcare system, added, “That’s all blown up.”
An employee at the Boston-based Dana-Farber Cancer Center stated, “The entire hospital is down.” “They requested that patients remain at home today until further notice, and we are also unable to use virtual visits.”
The broader Brigham Hospital system, which includes Dana-Farber, tweeted that it was suspending all non-emergency surgeries, procedures, or medical visits “due to the severity” of the outage.
The employee of Dana-Farber stated that although employees booked for today were told to report for duty, they were not allowed to view patient medical records.
The staffer stated, “They said they found a fix, but to apply the fix, they have to go to every computer in the hospital individually.”
Large-scale computer outages are nothing new to the healthcare industry.
Over the past few years, ransomware hackers—many of whom are based in Russia—have been attacking American hospitals and other medical facilities virtually nonstop. Their goal is to lock up the computers of the target company and demand payment in Bitcoin in exchange for a code that can unlock them. Hospitals affected by ransomware frequently immediately switch to offline patient assistance methods, such as handwriting prescriptions and notes.
According to cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, the most recent issue was caused by a regular software update that unintentionally introduced a dangerous fault into Windows systems rather than an attack.
The issues of Friday went well beyond Boston.
The Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City posted a notice on its website stating that “systems issues” had forced the institution to “pause the start of any procedure that requires anesthesia.”
Patients should expect delays while the University of Miami Health System’s IT professionals attempt to restore computer connectivity. Hospitals are “using paper orders to disseminate information” until then, according to a Facebook statement from the institution.
Just before nine in the morning ET, a letter was issued to Northwell Health staff in New York informing them that the hospital system was also having issues related to the outage.
The leadership of Northwell wrote, “Due to the extensive scope of the harm, we have triggered our system emergency operations center to facilitate our reaction.”
The Durham, North Carolina-based Duke University Health System stated “There have been issues with crucial computer operations in our clinics and hospitals,” although the clinics were still operational.
However, other hospitals seemed to be completely unaffected or to have only a few small service interruptions.
Despite “interruptions overnight,” Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta claimed in a statement that patient care had not been significantly impacted.
Despite some technological difficulties, the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center in Columbus stated in a statement that “this is our current status: All of our facilities are open.”