Dr. Rian Kabir, a third-year psychiatry resident at the University of Louisville, always arrives to the school’s outpatient mental health clinic early. He likes to come prepared, having reviewed his patients’ charts and which medications they're taking before they arrive for their appointments. But today—following a global tech outage that begin in the early morning hours—that was impossible.
“When I came in, every single computer was down,” Dr. Kabir says, noting that he couldn’t review electronic patient records, couldn’t access the drug monitoring program he uses, or even submit prescriptions to pharmacies electronically. His team has reverted to handwriting everything on paper—like medical staff did a century ago—and it has slowed down everything in the clinic. “This is pretty insane,” Dr. Kabir says.
The tech outage, which is due to an apparent faulty software update from cybersecurity provider CrowdStrike, has sowed chaos across the nation's healthcare system. The damage shows how intertwined technology has become with 21st century medical care, and how one glitch can send the healthcare industry into a tailspin.
Many hospitals and labs across the U.S. and globally have had their systems shut down, leading some hospitals to cancel or delay procedures and surgeries. Medical staff at many facilities have had to revert to documenting everything via pen and paper and calling in prescriptions.
Boston-based Brigham and Women's Hospital canceled all previously scheduled non-urgent surgeries, procedures, and medical visits. Cone Health, a health-care network in North Carolina, canceled treatments, procedures, and surgeries. Corewell Health, a Michigan-based health care system, issued an alert to customers that many of its computers had been impacted and that procedures and appointments could be delayed. Even labs like Labcorp said the outage impacted their ability to deliver lab results to physicians and patients—which could potentially result in delays for hospital discharges or admissions as well as treatment.
Emergency rooms have largely stayed open to provide critical care, although they have faced the same computer system snaufs. Meanwhile, some healthcare providers, like Midwestern health care system Mercy Health, have managed to avoid the upheaval, saying they hadn’t been impacted by the outage at all.
System shutdowns aren't unknown in the medical industry. In fact, they’re so frequent due to faulty software updates or cybersecurity attacks that there have been several studies conducted on the effect of the resulting delays and how to manage the fallout. Just earlier this year, Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago went offline for weeks after a cyberattack exposed its patient data.
Dr. Kabir recalled a cyberattack at the private hospital where he was working a year ago that also forced doctors and nurses to revert to updating patient records in writing. At the time, Dr. Kabir said cardiologists were unable to review electrocardiograms, the critical tests that measure electrical activity of the heart. "I’d say most people have done it at least one or two times,” he said.
Ironically, hospitals and clinics are using companies like CrowdStrike specifically to avoid these sorts of shutdowns and bolster the safety of the often outdated tech systems they rely on. The CrowdStrike episode has underscored that system shutdowns may be unavoidable.
The healthcare industry is just one of many industry's slammed by the outage. The glitch has shaken the entire global economy—impacting everything from airlines to television stations to government agencies. “My morning started with a 4 a.m. call from the Situation Room to highlight the issue that occurred with CrowdStrike,” Anne Neuberger, Deputy Assistant to President Biden and Deputy National Security Advisor for cyber and emerging technologies, said on stage this morning at the Aspen Security Forum, when asked about the outage.
By mid-afternoon on Friday, the tech outages had improved for some of the impacted hospitals. Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, which had canceled appointments earlier in the day, said in an announcement in the afternoon that its operations had “been restored with some minor exceptions that we are actively addressing and we expect to be resolved soon.”
But not for everybody: “My computer is still down,” Dr. Kabir said Friday afternoon.
