Computer outage at UPMC called 'rare'
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UPMC's electronic medical records system for inpatients went offline for more than 14 hours at nearly all its hospitals in the region, marking what the health system called a "rare" outage, but one that it claims did not harm patients.
The outage affected a system designed by Cerner Corp., a global electronic records company, and customized by UPMC that doctors and nurses rely on for communication about patient records, medical orders and prescriptions.
It was unavailable from about 8:45 p.m. Thursday to 11 a.m. Friday at almost all of UPMC's hospitals except for Children's and UPMC Hamot in Erie, spokeswoman Wendy Zellner said.
"This is rare. This kind of widespread, extensive downtime would be rare," Ms. Zellner said.
Doctors and nurses continued to have access to patients' electronic records through backup systems, she said. They also had to resort to using old-fashioned paper records for documentation and orders.
"These things happen. They have really well spelled-out procedures for what to do when something goes down," Ms. Zellner said.
She acknowledged that doctors and nurses faced some challenges.
"Whenever people aren't working in their native system and workflow I have to believe that is more cumbersome for the clinicians, but these folks are well-trained in what to do when these things happen."
Ms. Zellner said UPMC's public relations staff was unaware of the outage until contacted by a reporter.
The outage was caused by a "bug" or glitch in software designed by a vendor affiliated with Cerner, Ms. Zellner said. She refused to identify the company.
"We're not trying to point fingers at different vendors. It's a database bug, that's all I can tell you."
Scot M. Silverstein, a doctor and assistant professor Healthcare Informatics at Drexel University in Philadelphia, disagreed with the use of the terms "bug" and "glitch."
"What occurred here was a disruptive, potentially dangerous major malfunction of a life-critical enterprise medical device," he said.
Ms. Zellner said the problem was not a "crash" of the system because there were alternate methods used to cope that prevented patient care from being compromised.
"This is not a crash of Cerner either," Ms. Zellner said. "I think a crash is, 'Oh my God, the sky is falling,' nobody can get anything."
Technicians from UPMC, Cerner and the third company worked together on-site to identify and fix the problem. Ms. Zellner said she did not know why it took 14 hours to fix and the underlying cause was still unclear.
"They know what the problem is and I believe it's been fixed, but we really don't know what triggered it," Ms. Zellner said. "I think the next step would be some actual software upgrades."
A Cerner representative could not be reached for comment.
Dr. Silverstein said based on what he was told about the computer outage, it means that hospital medical staff would have been unable to update patient charts and probably would not have been able to issue any orders through the system during the time it was off line.
He also questioned how up-to-date the hospital's redundant records were.
In May, Allegheny General Hospital had to shut its electronic medical records computer system down because of problems with the vendor's hardware.
The hospital used backup procedures to continue care for patients, including using paper orders and record-keeping.
First Published December 24, 2011 12:00 am
