Nearly 90 physicians were without access to Maryville, Tenn.-based Blount Memorial Hospital's computer network for about three days in early May after a corrupted file took down its physicians group system, according to The Daily Times.
Responding to an open records request, a hospital spokesperson told The Daily Times the issue began May 2 and caused a three-day failure of the computer network used by the Blount Memorial Physicians Group, which comprises 88 physicians.
The hospital resolved the issue by implementing "technical changes" and restored its system with backup files. Blount did not provide an estimate for the number of patients that had been affected, though it said some appointments had to be rescheduled.
"We do not have an exact number of patients affected throughout the entire system, as many patients still were seen through the downtime," the hospital told The Daily News in a statement.
Blount expects costs associated with the outage to be low. "We believe revenue loss, if any, is minimal, as many patients still were able to be seen and those who had to have their appointments canceled have since been contacted about a reschedule date," the hospital wrote in its statement.
Blount CEO Don Heinemann said "everyone was frustrated" with the system failure, but hospital staff "worked around the clock to identify the problem and bring the system back up."
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