United States: The global CrowdStrike IT outage is significantly impacting countless industries, including healthcare. Major US hospitals are struggling to access systems containing crucial patient records, leading some health centers to cancel non-urgent surgeries and procedures.
This mass outage, which began on Friday, is affecting patient care across many major hospital systems in the US.
Non-Emergent Appointments and Surgeries Canceled
Some of the healthcare centers are struggling to access patients’ digits records including the information which is very important for the patient care such as the. Medical history and the recent medications they’ve taken and others are cancelling non-emergency surgeries and the procedures.
Mount Nittany health in the Pennsylvania said it was cancelling “all non-emergent appointments including the surgeries at the multiple locations because of the significant disruptions across the whole health care system.
As reported in Business Insider, the Harris Health Quentin Mease Health Center in Houston said it was cancelling “outpatient clinic appointments and elective hospital procedures and also reported in the NBC news.
However the medical staff is facing the problems because of the outage and hospital visitations and the patient information was not available at two hospitals due to the outage the Harris’ health centers are open for clinic appointments but some of the services may not be available said on the social media.
Patient Care Complicated by System Issues
New York’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center said Friday afternoon that it was “having systems issues” but that most of its systems and procedures had been reinstated. The center had earlier in the day said it was “pausing the start of any procedure that requires anesthesia,” Bloomberg reported.
Besides postponing procedures, the outage has also complicated patient care in other ways. Nurses across the country have said on social media, for example, that the outage has forced them to create patients’ medical charts on paper due to computer system issues.