The hospital’s board of directors unanimously approved the request organized by Blount Memorial Physicians Group and the hospital’s information systems director, Andrew Skeenes, during a meeting in late June.
The system will aggregate chart information nightly and store it on computers at each Blount facility. Should there be a systemwide or facility-specific outage, charts would still be able to be printed.
The May 2 outage stemmed from a corrupt file and took down the entire Blount computer network, resulting in numerous appointment cancellations. The hospital previously said costs associated with the outage were expected to be low.
In addition to the backup system, $510,065 in emergency capital expense requests, including $9,380 to replace two stepper exercise machines at its outpatient rehab clinic; $45,000 to buy a new CT machine at one of its facilities; and $455,685 for other hospital improvements were approved by the board.
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