While transitioning to an EHR has its advantages, it can cause headaches when the system goes down.
Sometimes an outage is inevitable: Due to software failure, hardware failure or electrical outage, a hospital may have to go without access to its EHR. The ONC recommends developing a contingency plan to deal with planned or unplanned outages to avoid negative experiences or outcomes for patients. A lack of planning can result in missed documentation, unavailability of images or cancelled procedures, which carries potential hazards for patients, according to the ONC.
Developing a substitute workflow, such as having a spare electrical generator or duplicated hardware that runs the systems critical to a hospital's operation, can help alleviate some of the hazards, according to the ONC.
Here are three recent unplanned EHR outages and why they occurred.
1. Boston Children's Hospital: The pediatric center recently experienced a six-day outage that affected portions of the patient care system. The Boston Globe reported that the system went down because of a hardware issue related to storage. The hospital has a contingency plan in place, so fewer than five elective medical admissions were postponed and no surgeries were cancelled.
2. Antelope Valley Hospital: The hospital in Lancaster, Calif., experienced an outage in late February. The hospital experienced a hardware failure when the card that communicates to its data storage malfunctioned, causing it to lose connectivity to the storage platform from late Feb. 27 until the morning of March 1. The hospital had a contingency plan in case of an outage, which includes reverting back to handwritten notes and orders. The hospital still uses paper charts for approximately 50 percent of its patient because it is still transitioning to a fully digital record system.
3. Rideout Memorial Hospital: The hospital in Marysville, Calif., experienced an outage for several days when a heating system in an off-site data center malfunctioned, causing its computer system to shut down. No patient records were lost, but the malfunction occurred during a Joint Commission on the Accreditation of Hospitals audit. The hospital does not currently have that certification. Patient records and internal email were unavailable during the shutdown, forcing the postponement of some radiation treatments in the hospital's cancer center.