It took a rural Minnesota health system a week to recover from the recent global IT outage that affected large swaths of the healthcare industry, the Kittson County (Minn.) Enterprise reported.
Late on July 18, when sectors from airlines to banking to media were disrupted, most of Hallock, Minn.-based Kittson Healthcare's 160 computers had blank blue screens, according to the Aug. 15 story. The outage was caused by a faulty update from cybersecurity company CrowdStrike sent to workstations operating on Microsoft Windows.
"It affected every computer in the facility except maybe 10 of them," Kittson Healthcare CIO Holly Knutson told the newspaper.
She had to physically reinstall the operating system on every computer, starting in the emergency department, the news outlet reported. The health system's staff switched back to using paper records, while the radiology department couldn't send X-rays and CT scans to be read.
The hospital and ED staff "have the most amazing downtime process," Ms. Knutson told the publication. "If their hands are tied behind their back, they can still function." She finished fixing the bad patch July 25.