The entire Tuba City Regional Health Care Corporation (TCRHCC) health system experienced a network outage Tuesday evening, December 13, and the IT department reported Friday morning the issue had been resolved.
TCRHCC, Sacred Peaks Health Center and LeChee Health Facility were impacted by the outage. The network interruptions caused the hospital to make the decision to revert back to prior paper processes.
“The hospital reverted to its paper-based systems. Employees printed records and manually monitored prescription doses. Lab tests were done as normal, but results were sent to doctors on paper instead of via computer. Our staff has worked on processes to assure safety when technology fails us,” said Lynette Bonar, CEO.
Systems affected by the network problems included:
- Inpatient and outpatient software applications such as ICS-Stockell, Orchard, WinPharm, ProPharm, RPMS that offer access to clinical records including problem lists, medications, allergies, notes, electrocardiograms, labs and X-rays.
“No changes in clinical care occurred, except for delays in service,” Bonar said. “Surgeries proceeded, all transfers and admissions were accepted but with a slowed down process. We apologize for this occurrence and work hard to assure we have backup systems in place to continue to provide quality services.”
The hospital staff was competent and diligent in responding to the problems created by the outage and for ensuring that critical services could still be performed.
The interruption turned out to be a network environment change related to A root ID record on a network switch that did not have routing capabilities. This caused all network traffic to stop, which then caused all inpatient, outpatient software applications, and phones to stop working.
