Epic EHR Outages In Force Bay Area Docs On To Paper Records

Providers at two John Muir Health campuses in northern California were forced to paper records as a result of intermittent outages of their Epic EHR system on Monday, according to the Contra Costa Times.  Joyce Tsai reports that the health system’s Walnut Creek and Concord locations experienced periods of downtime from the late morning through the early evening despite internal expectations of a fix within a few hours.  “What we have are downtime procedures in place,” a spokesperson for John Muir told the Contra Costa Times, “and so we have computer systems that have backed up records, so our doctors, nurses and other clinicians can access medical records, patient histories, medications and past visits.”

Paper records were used because the Epic EHR system would not allow new information to be entered and were therefore the only means of caring for the immediate needs of patients. The hospital spokesperson indicated that information from the paper records would have to be entered manually into the patients’ EHRs once full functionality was restored.  In response to the outage, the hospitals initiated a call to divert patients from the locations in Walnut Creek and Concord to other local medical facilities which lasted for either ten minutes or two hours according to differing sources — one from John Muir and another from the ambulance company American Medical Response.

The cause of the outages remains unknown. The Bay Area health system began its $300-million implementation of its Epic EHR technology in July 2012, a process led by Jane Willemsen, President and Chief Administrative Officer at Walnut Creek, according to the San Francisco Business Times. Improved integration was the impetus behind the significant investment in Epic...