CrowdStrike outage disrupts hospitals, reveals healthcare IT flaws

The ongoing major IT outage that’s being blamed on a content update from cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike is disrupting a wide swath of industries Friday, from airlines to banking. But arguably no sector has been worse off than healthcare.

Electronic medical record systems (EMR) are down in doctors’ offices and hospitals around the world. Those systems are used to store everything from a patient’s medical history and doctors notes to billing and laboratory data. Now, with many offline, medical staff are having to revert to pen and paper charts.

That’s not necessarily catastrophic, but it does slow the process down considerably—and, for many millennial and Gen Z healthcare professionals, it’s a new way of doing things.

Epic Systems, which is the most widely used EMR system in the U.S. with more than 305 million patient medical records, tells Fast Company that while the CrowdStrike update did not directly impact its software or services, it did result in some technical issues that continue to prevent healthcare organizations from using its systems.

“Some groups have reported that the laptop and desktop workstations their staff use to access Epic are down,” the company spokesperson said. “Others report that issues with data center software are preventing them from using multiple systems including Epic.”

Epic added that its cloud-based platform, called Nebula, was impacted by the Azure Central region outage—an altogether separate incident, which knocked features such as telehealth visits offline on Friday. Access has since been restored to those features, a company spokesperson said.

Epic’s staff is working with customer IT teams to restore facilities’ access to its EMR system. Additionally, CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz told CNBC that the company is “actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts.” (Mac and Linux systems were not affected.)

So far, several major healthcare facilities have acknowledged disruptions in their operations. Pennsylvania’s Penn Medicine, on its website, warned some appointments might need to be canceled or rescheduled due to system outages. UVA Health, a health system associated with the University of Virginia, has closed its ambulatory clinics, except for its Cancer Center, as well as outpatient radiology and imaging. (Other UVA services, including dialysis, bloodwork, pharmacies and surgical procedures, are operating on a modified schedule.)

University of Miami hospitals and clinics are open but warned of delays as staff uses pen and paper to disseminate information. And New York’s Mount Sinai said all appointments remain as planned, unless the patient is notified, though it did indicate some nonurgent appointments and procedures could be delayed.

Across the pond, England’s National Health Service (NHS) said the majority of general practitioners in the country were experiencing a disruption of medical records systems as well as the service used to book doctors appointments.

“The NHS has long-standing measures in place to manage the disruption, including using paper patient records and handwritten prescriptions, and the usual phone systems to contact your GP,” the NHS said in a statement. “There are also some issues with administrative systems in hospitals that mean staff are having to work manually from paper to manage certain tasks, but in the majority of hospitals, care is continuing as normal.”

That appointment-and-records system, known as EMIS, is used by nearly 60% of England’s general physicians. EMIS acknowledged it was impacted by the outage, saying, in a notification on its website, “We are currently affected by a third-party issue that is impacting organisations globally, and we are working with the relevant parties to restore service as soon as possible.”

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