Hospitals across the U.S. postponed or canceled non-urgent surgeries due to IT outages stemming from a software update issue affecting computers running on Microsoft Windows.
The cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike issued the flawed update affecting computers and servers worldwide. Epic EHRs went down during the July 19 outage, disrupting access to medical records for hundreds of hospitals and physician clinics running on its system. Affected hospitals reverted to paper records and Epic is working with customer IT teams to restore access. Some Meditech EHR customers were also affected.
Some hospitals, including Boston-based Mass General Brigham and Renton, Wash.-based Providence, rescheduled non-urgent surgeries, according to the New York Times. UC San Francisco Health also postponed some non-urgent elective procedures, according to CNBC.
Other health systems, including Phoenix-based Banner Health, closed their clinics and outpatient facilities temporarily during the outage.
Reporting by Naomi Diaz and Giles Bruce of Becker's Healthcare contributed to this article.