Hospital Turns Away Ambulances When Computers Go Down

CurtMonash writes "The Indianapolis Star reports that Tuesday Morning, Methodist Hospital turned away patients in ambulances, for the first time in its 100-plus history. Why? Because the electronic health records (EHR) system had gone down the prior afternoon — due to a power surge — and the backlog of paperwork was no longer tolerable. If you think about that story, it has a couple of disturbing aspects. Clearly the investment in or design of high availability, surge protection, etc. were sadly lacking. But even leaving that aside — why do problems with paperwork make it necessary to turn away patients? Maybe the latter is OK, since there obviously were other, more smoothly running hospitals to send the patient to. Still, the whole story should be held up as a cautionary tale for hospitals and IT suppliers everywhere."

Comments

Re:More-words answer.

[plague3106]

Indeed. It would be nice to thin out the stupid, unless, leeches of society so that those of us that actually WANT to try to make our own living can.

That's what I hate about Methodist Hospital

[Locke2005]

The computers go down, but the nurses don't.

Re:A one word answer

[FlyingBishop]

I think you've been watching too much House.