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The Global IT Outage Sends Hospitals Reeling

Doctors find themselves without critical systems and diagnostic tools and faced with the daunting reality that a full recovery could take days after CrowdStrike's botched deployment of a software update.

It was half past midnight Eastern Standard Time when Andrew Rosenberg, an anesthesiologist and critical care doctor who works as chief information officer at Michigan Medicine, suddenly noticed that a substantial number of computers across the healthcare center had ceased to function. Studies have shown that during electronic medical record downtime, laboratory testing results are delayed by an average of 62% compared with normal operations, while in the NHS, IT failings have been directly linked with cases of patient harm. Dean Sittig, a professor of biomedical informatics at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, says that in case of such incidents, hospitals are supposed to have paper backup systems, and to ensure that vital devices such as IV pumps, blood pressure monitors, and ventilators which are controlled on the internal network are isolated from the internet.

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