Medical Report: Global tech outages highlight weaknesses in health care

PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — As investigators look into the recent global tech outage that crippled airlines, banks and a wide variety of industries, leaders in the health care field are also voicing concerns.

Disruption of care at hospitals has the potential to threaten lives. Epic is a major provider of electronic health records for numerous health systems. Although Epic was not impacted directly, the technical issues from the outage prevented usage of the systems.

In other words, the end users were locked out. Hospitals have downtime procedures, but they can vary dramatically from hospital to hospital.

It makes sense to develop a standardized approach — the stakes are too high not to.

Get more medical reports from Dr. Brian McDonough .

​​KYW Newsradio’s Medical Reports are sponsored by Independence Blue Cross.