Valley medical groups impacted by global outage

A global tech outage impacted hospitals and emergency services across the nation late Thursday night into Friday morning.

It was emergency medical services for Fresno County that first started experiencing outage problems.

"At approximately 11 o'clock last night, we were notified through our on call system our ambulance dispatch may be exhibiting some issues, so we called our on call program, after investigating the item, we found out that it was a crowd strike update," said Edward Hill, Chief Operating Officer for Fresno County.

But officials say there are plans in place when it comes to medical communication for first responders.

"In the communications center phone lines were up so everybody just kinds of shifts to new roles, so instead of using the computer to dispatch, its more writing the call nature down, asking the same questions you would and then handing that over to the radio operator -- and then the radio operator dispatches the closest, most appropriate unit," said Ben Wiele with American Ambulance.

Wiele adds because of the training they have, they were still able to meet the requirements of responding to emergencies.

"We automatically deliver our patient care reports to the hospital, but it was just delayed until the system came back online, it kind of just felt a little old school last night," said Wiele.

He says they are now fully back online.

Local hospitals also experienced similar problems, including those within Community Health Systems.

"Along with so many others, Community Health System is experiencing some issues with the widespread global tech disruptions. It has not impacted our ability to provide patient care in our hospitals, and has had minimal impact to our outpatient centers and clinics," wrote Eric Saff, Senior VP Chief Information Officer for Community Health Systems.

"Our IT teams have been working diligently to alleviate remaining technology issues and, so far, we are seeing positive results."

Valley Children's Hospital also released a statement about the disruption, writing:

Valley Children's Healthcare experienced a brief disruption Friday due to the global software outage. There was no impact on the care of any of our patients. Our Information Technology Services team quickly resolved the faulty software update that affected our systems and businesses throughout the world.

Adventist Health reported that it was not directly impacted by the outage, writing in a statement:

Earlier today, a software update failure at the cybersecurity company CrowdStrike caused disruption with systems running Microsoft to be impacted, creating widespread problems for banking, airline, and healthcare systems globally. Adventist Health is not a customer of CrowdStrike; we were not directly affected; however, we experienced some impact with select third-party systems that rely on this technology. We are monitoring the affected vendors for any direct impact on our health system.

At Saint Agnes Medical Center, officials say the impacts of the outage were also minimal, writing.

Early this morning, Saint Agnes Medical Center experienced issues with some workstations and applications with Windows-based devices running CrowdStrike. As soon as the issue was identified, updates were halted and standard protocols to restore service and communicate with colleagues were implemented. Only a small percentage of our servers were affected. The majority of the technical issues have been remediated, and there has been no impact to patient safety.

In the South Valley, Kaweah Health also felt some minor impacts of the outage.

"We have had minor interruptions, but nothing mission-critical. Patient care has not been impacted," said Doug Leeper, Chief Information and Cybersecurity Officer for Kaweah Health.

Kaiser Permanente reports that its systems were affected, but its hospitals and offices remained open, writing in a statement:

The global CrowdStrike IT outage that is affecting health care organizations and others across the world is also affecting some Kaiser Permanente systems. We activated our national command center at 4:30 a.m. PT to address this incident, evaluate the impacts to our care operations, computer systems and servers, and coordinate recovery as needed. In some situations, we have activated backup systems to support both continuous patient care and to secure access to medical records. All Kaiser Permanente hospitals and medical offices remain open for care and service, and we are continuing to monitor our operations as we work to restore all affected systems.

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