Outage during 'routine maintenance' throws 15 UNC Health hospitals offline
Operations are back to normal at UNC Rex after a computer outage impacted patient services for three hours Wednesday night.
Posted — UpdatedThe computer outage was repaired around 10:30 p.m. after 15 affected hospitals in the UNC Health system were forced to stop accepting patients for three hours.
During the disruption, the hospitals accepted only walk-in patients but not ambulance admissions.
The network outage was caused by "an unforeseen issue" during routine maintenance, according to a spokesperson for UNC Health.
Clark Walton, managing director of Reliance Forensics, says part of keeping data secure is upgrading systems, and that doesn't always go smoothly.
"Unplanned things happen. Things don't work exactly like you thought they might, and maybe there's a delay, and that's probably what occurred here instead of some data breach," he hypothesized.
UNC Health said they used their contingency plan while the system was shut down, allowing them to still care for patients who were already in the building.
"Our hospital staff's response to this situation was phenomenal," said Alan Wolf, a spokesperson for UNC Health. "They came together and continued to provide high level care to all of our patients. We applaud our nurses, physicians, pharmacists and other providers who work tirelessly to provide excellent patient care at all times."
UNC Health's IT team is working with vendors to determine the cause of the outage.
A spokesperson said the power outage did not affect the entire hospital, but a number of systems went offline temporarily. Power was restored, and no patients were adversely affected by the temporary outages.
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