Doctors and nurses say the statewide network outage has caused disruption at many hospitals and hope the third-party review promised by the Alberta Health Service will lead to credible backup plans.
According to AHS, the outage occurred early Monday morning during scheduled maintenance.
“The cause of the outage was identified as a routine maintenance change made to the system early in the morning. We are working with the vendor to understand why this happened,” a spokesperson said. Kelly Williamson said in an email.
The outage affected a wide range of services, including electronic medical record systems, Health Link and lab operations.
Hospitals were overwhelmed, surgeries were delayed, and emergency rooms were left with massive backlogs.
“It was very chaotic,” said Dr. Arun Abi, an emergency physician at Calgary’s Peter Lawheed Hospital.
Staff were locked out of computer systems. According to Abbi, this included Connect Care, a new centralized clinical information system being rolled out statewide, and a medical imaging program.
Even the paging system was down, he said.
“I couldn’t see an X-ray. I couldn’t see a CT. I couldn’t see a diagnostic image. I couldn’t search Netcare. Patient history, labs, previous CT scans.” We couldn’t even search for ‘ , compare previous x-rays,’ said Abbi, who is also president of the Alberta Medical Association’s Department of Emergency Medicine.
Doctors waited up to five hours for blood test results, Abbi said.
All of this has led to massive backlogs and long waits in already overcrowded emergency rooms.
“When computers came along, I think we were backing up 50 to 55 patients,” Abbi said.
delay in surgery
Dr. Tony Gomez, president of the Alberta General Surgeons Association, said:
“Frankly, I can’t believe this is going to happen….If this goes on for a day or two, it’s a complete disaster. The system essentially shuts down.”
Elective surgeries have been closed in most of Alberta, with some exceptions, including hospitals in Lethbridge and Medicine Hat, where Connect Care has yet to be rolled out, Gomes said.
“Most hospitals in Alberta … could only do emergency surgery … which had to be done within the next six hours.”
Based on discussions with colleagues, Gomes estimates that between 100 and 140 non-urgent surgeries were canceled in Calgary alone on Monday.
“I think they need to find out what happened and make sure it doesn’t happen again. It’s that simple.”
Abbi agrees and hopes AHS will find a clear answer.
“I think they have to find a backup IT power source… system. If something fails, they can switch to another computer system that keeps the system running,” he said.
AHS compatible
AHS confirmed Wednesday that it has hired a third party “who specializes in networks and infrastructure” to investigate the outage.
An internal review of clinical response is also underway, Williamson said, and will look for response gaps and potential improvements.
Patients whose surgery was postponed are now rebooked. Health officials have yet to confirm the number of affected surgical patients.
“I am extremely grateful for the work of the AHS staff and doctors who have done an amazing job in providing patient care in difficult circumstances,” Williamson said.
“They responded quickly and calmly and switched to downtime procedures, which are trained and ready to use when needed.”
Hospital outpatient clinics were also affected.
“Additionally, all outpatient clinics within the hospital were canceled because we were unable to access patient lists and their charts for most of the day,” said Gomes.
Rebecca Brown, a registered nurse, said computers at her outpatient infusion clinic at Calgary’s Foothills Medical Center went down Monday morning, one by one.
“Everything is computerized in our hospital, so it was like, ‘What am I supposed to do now?’ The internet was down. The computers were down. Everything was down. ‘ she said.
“We tried to make sure it didn’t impact patients too much….There are downtime procedures.So once we figured out what we had to do, we did it.” “
That meant relying on pen and paper.
“We could change the schedule to take some of the pressure off a little bit for some of our patients, but all day long we were like, ‘I’m going to be up soon, I’ve got to be up soon, I’ve got to be up right now.’ But it never happened for the entire 12-hour shift,” she said.
“It would be terrifying to see an entire state fall apart.”
