“Technology can always fail”: Local hospitals respond to national outage

As soon as our local hospitals learned about the national outage, they immediately jumped into action to see how it would impact their patient care.

Chief Communication Officer for Singing River Health System, Michael Dozier, says the hospital’s first course of action was identifying the risk.

“We were up this morning very early making sure that our systems were not impacted and finding out the vendors that were impacted,” Dozier said. “Making sure that it wasn’t a cyber security event or something that we would have to worry about impacting us.”

Singing River Hospital was relieved to see no impact on healthcare or safety, but Dozier tells us other hospitals haven’t been as lucky.

“Peers across the country that I’ve worked with for years are impacted,” said Dozier. “They’re going through and making the fixes on all of their computers that were impacted. It certainly slows down operations. It slows down patient care.”

Dozier says that in the last decade, hospitals have become very reliant on the advancements of technology. Chief Business Development Officer, Nikki Johns, with AGJ Systems and Networks says every business should prepare for the day a system goes down.

“Technology can always fail and I think people forget that,” Johns said. “We don’t know how to go back to pencil and paper like we used to use for things when these outages would take place because we’re so dependent on technology these days. It’s important to have a plan in place if an outage like this occurs, have written policy and procedure, business continuity plan that allows your employees to know exactly what to do in case of an outage.”

Singing River Health System already has a policy in place for an outage. While they weren’t affected this time, they are still using this as a learning opportunity.

“This wasn’t a cyber security event,” Dozier said. “This was just an update across the country and across the world. And you can see how sensitive critical infrastructure is across many different industries and sectors. Any organization, whether it’s healthcare or a different industry, we’ve all got to prepare for how to recover and how to do it as quickly as possible because things like this are going to continue to happen. It is something that we have to prepare for our organization, and how to continue operating with or without a system.”