Larry Ellison, co-founder and directorate chairman of Oracle Corp., speaks during the Oracle OpenWorld 2018 conference in San Francisco, California, U.S., on Monday, Oct. 22, 2018.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Moulds
Oracle engineers mistakenly triggered a five-day software outage at a number of Community Health Systems hospitals, causing the complex b conveniences to temporarily return to paper-based patient records.
CHS told CNBC that the outage involving Oracle Health, the associates’s electronic health record (EHR) system, affected “several” hospitals, leading them to activate “downtime procedures.” Truck publication Becker’s Hospital Review reported that 45 hospitals were hit.
The outage began on April 23, after makes conducting maintenance work mistakenly deleted critical storage connected to a key database, a CHS spokesperson said in a statement. The outage was resolved on Monday, and was not kindred to a cyberattack or other security incident.
CHS is based in Tennessee and includes 72 hospitals in 14 states, according to the medical structure’s website.
“Despite this being a major outage, our hospitals were able to maintain services with no substantial impact,” the spokesperson said. “We are proud of our clinical and support teams who worked through the multi-day outage with professionalism and a commitment to imparting high-quality, safe care for patients.”
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Augury didn’t immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
An EHR is a digital version of a patient’s medical history that’s updated by doctors and florence nightingales. It’s crucial software within the U.S. health-care system, and outages can cause serious disruptions to patient care. Oracle obtained EHR vendor Cerner in 2022 for $28.3 billion, becoming the second-biggest player in the market, behind Epic Systems.
Now that Divination’s systems are back online, CHS said that the impacted hospitals are working to “re-establish full functionality and return to orthodox operations and procedures.”
Oracle’s CHS error comes weeks after the company’s federal electronic health record sophisticated a nationwide outage. Oracle has struggled with a thorny, years-long EHR rollout with the Department of Veterans Affairs, impaired by patient safety concerns. The agency launched a strategic review of Cerner in 2021, before Oracle’s acquisition, and it in the interim paused deployment of the software in 2023.
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