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.
The 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.
UNC could not tell WRAL News how many patients were diverted, but a WakeMed spokesperson said, "Hospitals work incredibly hard to avoid diversion and level out quickly with support from community resources."
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 says it's confident the outage was not due to "malicious activity.
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 pulled in extra staff, shuffled resources and relied on paper to keep working during the outage, but says no patient care was impacted.
UNC Health's IT team is working with vendors to determine the cause of the outage.
Brett Callow, a a threat analyst with EMSISOFT, says it doesn't really matter why a system is offline. There are impacts simply to the loss of connectivity.
"If it takes longer for a stroke patient to get treatment because the ambulance carrying them has to be diverted to the next nearest hospital, it really doesn't matter whether ransomware or a mistake by IT was the cause," he said.
Dr. Wesley Burks, CEO of UNC Health, sent a letter to staff saying the system will continue to review their response and refine plans to deal with similar situations in the future.
In August, UNC Rex experienced a power surge as the result of an area lightning strike. The power surge caused hospital circuit breakers to trip, cutting power to more than 10 departments in the hospital, including the labor and delivery unit, neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), emergency department and some areas of radiology.
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.
