Last Friday, Boston Children's Hospital's system experienced an outage that affected portions of the electronic system for patient care.
During the outage, order labs, pharmacy and electronic prescription writing were affected. Digital imaging, patient registration and scheduling continued to run, according to a hospital statement.
"The outage was quickly identified, and the staff quickly shifted to patient care services that don't rely on electronic systems, such as face-to-face communications, direct hand-offs, read backs and running pharmacy notes from floor to pharmacy," according to the hospital statement.
All systems were fully functioning as of Wednesday afternoon.
According to the Boston Globe, the outage was caused by a hardware issue related to storage. Hospital spokesman Rob Graham told the Globe that less than five elective medical admissions were postponed, and all surgeries continued as planned.
Mr. Graham told the Globe the system has never been down for so long before, but the hospital has plans in place to handle these types of outages.
"Everybody was really reminded that the systems that keep Boston Children's running are people, not just technology," Mr. Graham told the Globe.
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