Technical issues due to the global IT outage affecting cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike are affecting how hospitals and health systems access their Epic EHRs.
CrowdStrike creates software designed to detect and prevent cyberattacks. Its products are utilized by Fortune 500 companies, including healthcare organizations and their third-party vendors.
However, due to a July 19 update CrowdStrike released for its Falcon product, a platform that prevents breaches through cloud technology, devices running Microsoft's Windows operating system crashed due to a compatibility issue.
This crash led to disruptions that impacted hospitals and health systems across the U.S., including some of Epic's customers.
"The CrowdStrike update has not affected our software or services directly but has caused technical issues that prevent healthcare organizations from using their systems," an Epic spokesperson told Becker's in an emailed statement. "Some groups have reported that the laptop and desktop workstations their staff use to access Epic are down. Others report that issues with data center software are preventing them from using multiple systems including Epic."
Epic said its internal systems, including those it uses to provide remote support to customers worldwide, remain unaffected.
"Organizations that have been affected are following pre-established downtime protocols to continue delivering patient care," the spokesperson said. "Epic staff are working with customer IT teams to restore access as fixes or mitigation approaches are available from CrowdStrike."
EHR vendor Meditech also told Becker's that it is actively working to support its customers impacted by the CrowdStrike outage, but that the outage has only affected some customers using the CrowdStrike solution, which not all of its customers use.
"There has been no impact on our Meditech as a Service customer segment, which is hosted in the cloud by Meditech on the Google Cloud Platform," the spokesperson said in an emailed statement.
Becker's reached out to Oracle Health to assess if its customers were experiencing any issues related to the CrowdStrike incident and will update this story if more information becomes available.