Dive Brief:
- On March 20, a rare storage issue shut down Boston Children's Hospital's EHR system.
- During the outage, which lasted for five days, the hospital continued to function using paper and manpower to order diagnostic tests and medications and to track test and treatment results.
- Throughout the outage, all surgeries continued as scheduled. A few elective medical admissions were postponed.
Dive Insight:
The staff and providers at Boston Children's Hospital had to have been well prepared in order to weather such a lengthy EHR outage. "The hospital clinicians...immediately pivoted to patient care services that don.t rely on electronic health records, including face-to-face communication and hand-delivering prescriptions and lab results," Rob Graham, a hospital spokesman, told The Boston Globe. According to Graham, a very small number of additional staff were needed to survive the outage.
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