Dive Brief:
- Yuba City, CA-based Rideout Memorial Hospital is still recovering from the fallout in the wake of a long EHR outage. The outage was triggered when a High Volume Air Conditioning (HVAC) at its data center burned out, causing the McKesson Paragon EHR to go offline.
- The McKesson-built EHR was out for about a week after the HVAC unit died, causing a redundant unit to also overheat from the added load. Rideout CEO Robert Chason emphasized that McKesson's system was not culpable in the outage, and assured the media that the outage had little impact on patient care.
- Despite Chason's demurrals, he did admit that clinicians had no access to portions of their patients' records during the EHR blackout, and that many patients had to postpone radiation treatments.
Dive Insight:
While Chason may have been telling the truth as he knew it, it appears there were cases in which patients may indeed have been exposed to risk due to the McKesson downtime.
For example, his remarks to the local Appeal-Democrat prompted a reader, Edward Ferreira—whose wife was being treated at Rideout—to call Chason out on his comments. "My spouse went to Rideout almost two weeks ago and had a Lexiscan of her heart when the computer system went down," he wrote in a letter to the editor. "Here it is two weeks later and now they are saying because of the computer problem the entire test didn't get to her cardiologist until today. They think she may have had a minor heart attack and needs further cardiac intervention."
If nothing else, this episode is a warning that hospitals with weak disaster recovery processes—which Rideout arguably had—are at risk of a catastrophe if they don't step up and improve their plans and infrastructure. It also serves as a reminder that while the industry hasn't seen patients suffer serious harm or death due to an EHR outage, it may just be a matter of time.