Several San Diego area hospitals were caught in a computer outage early Wednesday evening, forcing some facilities to briefly divert ambulance deliveries.
Unlike the recent IT problems at Tri-City Medical Center in Oceanside and the month-long operational problems at Scripps Health in 2021, the cause of the latest problem, officials said, had nothing to do with hackers trying to take information hostage for ransom.
Sharp HealthCare confirmed that its Grossmont and Memorial hospital campuses were forced to stop accepting ambulance deliveries for approximately two hours, resuming all operations once the systems returned to service just after 6 p.m.
UC San Diego Health was affected by the same outage for the same duration, although Dr. Chris Longhurst, the organization’s chief medical officer, said no similar ambulance bypasses were needed at the facilities academics.
“There was a power outage at one of Epic’s data centers, which caused the system to go down for a short time, but we are now back up and running,” Longhurst said. “No patient care was affected; we train regularly for these situations and are fully prepared.
An Epic spokesperson, who declined to be identified, confirmed in an email Wednesday evening that a data center used by the medical records company in San Jose had experienced a “power issue.” which temporarily affected nine of its customers.
Typically, the locations of these IT operations have multiple redundant power supplies to prevent such an outage from occurring. No additional information was available Wednesday evening on the cause of the outage.
Epic is an electronic medical records system estimated in 2023 to have about 36% of the market, with most of the region’s large medical providers using its comprehensive services to track everything from prescriptions to progress notes that doctors and nurses use to document the care provided. patients receive.
Sharp recently dropped its systems from Cerner, the company’s main competitor.
John Cihomsky, vice president of communications at Sharp, said that although the outage temporarily interrupted communications with electronic medical records servers, workers were still able to back up records locally, using what the industry calls for “downtime procedures” until service is restored.
“Everything is back online and we are no longer using downtime procedures,” Cihomsky said.
Kaiser Permanente San Diego and Scripps Health both said their systems were not affected by the outage. It appeared, based on Scripps’ research, that medical providers who host Epic health records systems on their own servers, rather than outsourcing this function to Epic, were not affected.
California Daily Newspapers
