Larry Ellison, co-founder and executive chairman of Oracle Corp., speaks through the Oracle OpenWorld 2018 conference in San Francisco, California, U.S., on Monday, Oct. 22, 2018.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Oracle engineers mistakenly triggered a five-day software outage at a lot of Community Health Systems hospitals, causing the facilities to temporarily return to paper-based patient records.
CHS told CNBC that the outage involving Oracle Health, the corporate’s electronic health record (EHR) system, affected “several” hospitals, leading them to activate “downtime procedures.” Trade publication Becker’s Hospital Review reported that 45 hospitals were hit.
The outage began on April 23, after engineers conducting maintenance work mistakenly deleted critical storage connected to a key database, a CHS spokesperson said in an announcement. The outage was resolved on Monday, and was not related to a cyberattack or other security incident.
CHS is predicated in Tennessee and includes 72 hospitals in 14 states, in response to the medical system’s website.
“Despite this being a significant outage, our hospitals were able to keep up services with no material impact,” the spokesperson said. “We’re happy with our clinical and support teams who worked through the multi-day outage with professionalism and a commitment to delivering high-quality, secure take care of patients.”Â
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Oracle didn’t immediately reply to CNBC’s request for comment.
An EHR is a digital version of a patient’s medical history that is updated by doctors and nurses. It’s crucial software throughout the U.S. health-care system, and outages may cause serious disruptions to patient care. Oracle acquired EHR vendor Cerner in 2022 for $28.3 billion, becoming the second-biggest player out there, behind Epic Systems.
Now that Oracle’s systems are back online, CHS said that the impacted hospitals are working to “re-establish full functionality and return to normal operations and procedures.”
Oracle’s CHS error comes weeks after the corporate’s federal electronic health record experienced a nationwide outage. Oracle has struggled with a thorny, years-long EHR rollout with the Department of Veterans Affairs, marred by patient safety concerns. The agency launched a strategic review of Cerner in 2021, before Oracle’s acquisition, and it temporarily paused deployment of the software in 2023.
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