Mass General Brigham – one of the biggest healthcare systems in America – has axed all non-urgent visits, procedures and surgeries amid a global IT failure.
Hospitals were thrown into chaos overnight when the outage took out Windows systems around the world, knocking computers and medical devices offline and forcing medical staff to revert to pen and paper.
Mass General Brigham in Boston – which sees 2.5million patients a year in its 15 hospitals and clinics – said it would only provide care to patients who have urgent health problems.
Mass General Brigham – one of the biggest healthcare systems in America – has axed all non-urgent visits, procedures and surgeries amid a global IT failure (stock)
‘We have dedicated every available resource to resolve this issue as quickly as possible, and we apologize for the inconvenience this has caused our patients,’ the provider said.
‘It is our highest priority to ensure that our patients receive the safest care possible.’
A spokesperson added: ‘We continue to care for all patients currently receiving care in our hospitals.’
Tufts Medical Center and South Shore Health, also in Boston, were also experiencing issues linked to the global tech outage.
But the issue extends well beyond Massachusetts. Hundreds of hospitals are thought to be impacted by the issue.
The Mount Sinai Health System, which operates seven major hospitals in New York City and Long Island, as well as dozens of specialty and out patient clinics across the five boroughs, has seen their computer systems go down because of the outage.
Workers throughout the system, which is ranked as one of the best in the country, have also had to move to pen and paper medical charting.
Employees at Cornell in New York also say their systems are down.
NewYork-Presbyterian, which oversees Weill Cornell Medicine and Columbia in New York, said its hospitals have not been ‘directly impacted’ by the outage and its hospitals are continuing to operate normally.
The system is also working with its partner healthcare facilities to ‘assess the impact to their outpatient services.’
Penn Medicine, which has eight hospitals across Pennsylvania and New Jersey, is experiencing an outage of its systems and has had to delay non emergent surgeries, as well as resort to handwritten charts.
Healthcare workers say Epic, a major medical software program, is non operational.
Epic is used in hospitals across the world and in 2022, it held medical records of 78 percent of patients in the United States and more than three percent of patients worldwide.
Without access to patient’s digital charts, healthcare providers cannot see medical history or previous medications given, putting patients at risk of major complications.
The outage is believed to be from a software update from a cybersecurity company called CrowdStrike, a tool is used to protect against hacking threats, and is not believed to be linked to a malicious cyberattack.
While paper charts were the norm for decades in healthcare, the advent of technology in the medical field made them obsolete and nearly all day-to-day operations are conducted via computer programs.
Frightened healthcare staff and patients are documenting the chaos inside hospitals caused by a major worldwide IT outage on social media.
In one TikTok video, a woman in a breathing mask suggested her electronic medical records could not be accessed, leaving her unable to get the correct meds.
In another, staff can be heard shouting with panicked voices as the camera pans to a a computer that has been knocked offline and is showing a so-called ‘screen of death’.
Meanwhile a nurse in California detailed how staff have had to revert to pen and paper and using iPhones to treat patients and prescribe drugs, raising the risk of errors.
Also thrown into chaos were 911 and non-emergency call centers which are not working correctly across multiple states.
While the full impact of the bug is not known yet, hundreds of thousands of computers around the world suddenly shut down in the middle of the night, impacting businesses, transport links and TV broadcasts globally.
The issue seemed to impact PCs running on Microsoft’s Windows 10.
This is a developing story
