Larry Ellison, co-founder and executive chairman of Oracle Corp., will speak at the Oracle OpenWorld 2018 Conference held in San Francisco, California, USA on Monday, October 22, 2018.
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Oracle Engineers accidentally caused a five-day software outage at many community health systems hospitals, causing the facility to temporarily return to paper-based patient records.
CHS told CNBC that the outages involving Oracle Health, the company’s electronic health record (EHR) system, had affected “several” hospitals and led them to activate “downtime procedures.” A review of the hospitals in the trade publication Becker reported that 45 hospitals had been attacked.
The outage began on April 23 after an engineer performing the maintenance work accidentally deleted critical storage connected to a major database, a CHS spokesperson said in a statement. The outage was resolved on Monday and had nothing to do with cyberattacks or other security incidents.
According to the Health System website, CHS is based in Tennessee and includes 72 hospitals in 14 states.
“Even though this is a massive outage, our hospital was able to maintain services that have no material impact,” the spokesman said. “We are proud of our clinical and support teams who have gone through a few days of suspensions and have carried out their professionalism and commitment to providing high quality, safe care to our patients.”
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Oracle did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
The EHR is a digital version of a patient’s medical history updated by a doctor or nurse. This is a critical software within the US healthcare system, and outages can cause serious disruption to patient care. Oracle acquired Ehr vendor Cerner for $28.3 billion in 2022, making it the second largest player after Epic Systems.
Now that Oracle’s system is back online, CHS said the affected hospitals are “working to reestablish full functionality and return to normal operations and procedures.”
Oracle’s CHS error occurs a few weeks after the company’s federal electronic health records experienced a nationwide outage. Oracle has struggled with the longstanding deployment of EHR with the Department of Veterans Affairs, which is plagued by patient safety concerns. The agency began a strategic review of Cerner in 2021 prior to the Oracle acquisition and temporarily suspended the software deployment in 2023.
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