Hospitals Cancel Nonessential Surgeries After Global Technology Outage

Hospitals and health care providers across the United States told patients Friday morning that a global technology outage had downed some information technology systems, resulting in canceled surgeries and other procedures, though the hospitals emphasized that emergency departments remained open.

Some major hospital systems were affected, including the Kaiser Permanente medical system, which runs dozens of hospitals and hundreds of medical offices in the western United States and elsewhere in the country. Kaiser Permanente activated its national command center around 7:30 a.m. Eastern to address “widespread” effects of the outage on its system, said Steve Shivinsky, a spokesperson for the health provider.

The outage was affecting “all of our hospitals,” said Shivinsky, who called the situation “unprecedented.”

Banner Health, a large system based in Phoenix that operates hospitals and health care centers in six states, said that it closed clinics, urgent care centers and other outpatient facilities Friday morning, but that hospitals would remain open for inpatient care and medical emergencies.

Mass General Brigham hospital system, which operates 15 hospitals across New England, had canceled all nonurgent procedures, surgeries and visits, hospital officials said Friday morning.

The problems stemmed in many places from hospitals losing access to patient record systems.

When Epic Systems, a widely used patient record-management application, went down Thursday night at hospitals in the Providence Health system, “we knew we had a catastrophe on our hands,” said B.J. Moore, the chief information officer.

With 52 hospitals in seven states and 1,000 clinics, Providence Health, based in Renton, Washington, is one of the largest health systems in the country, Moore said. Patient records continued to be accessible on phones and iPads, he said, but enough applications, including ones used in surgeries, were down that many nonemergency procedures had to be canceled Friday.

All 15,000 servers that run constantly were down. And thousands of computers — some 40,000 out of 150,000 throughout the system — “blue-screened” or had other issues starting Thursday night.

Moore estimated that more than 1,000 people across Providence Health, including some in India, were working to fix the outage, and that fully restoring operations could take weeks. “This is worse than a cyberattack,” he said, adding that in a cyberattack, only Providence would be affected, not the other companies it relies on, including labs that process blood work and medical suppliers.

Several other hospitals and hospital networks also reported disruptions, which occurred after a software update issued by CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm, led systems to crash.

The two largest providers of dialysis in the United States, DaVita and Fresenius Medical Care, said in statements that the outage did not affect patients.

Despite major disruptions to commercial air travel, the transport of donated organs was also largely unaffected, according to several sources in the organ transplantation world.

Most organs are not transported on commercial flights, said Anne Paschke, a spokesperson for the United Network for Organ Sharing, or UNOS, the organization that manages the U.S. organ transplantation system under contract with the federal government. The organs are instead transported on chartered flights or hospital helicopters, or, when traveling shorter distances, they are driven to their destination.

The system that matches organs with recipients did go down, however. It was out for about an hour in the early hours of Friday, but was “back online” before 2:30 a.m., according to a statement from UNOS.

For many, the issues at hospitals came as a surprise.

Ian Philp, who lives in Brooklyn, New York, said his family arrived at Maimonides Medical Center on Friday morning, only to learn that his son’s tonsil and adenoid operation had been called off. The family had not received a call about the cancellation, Philp said, nor could they reschedule: The scheduling system was down.

His son, who is 7, was relieved, Philp said. “He gets a free day, but he was sad he was not going to have an all-ice-cream diet for a week.”

Citing the “global IT outage,” Maimonides Medical Center said on social media that it had canceled some nonessential procedures, but that “we remain open and patients continue to receive safe, high-quality care.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .