Philadelphia-based Penn Medicine's top executives were awakened by urgent phone calls at 2:30 a.m. on July 19 after finding out that CrowdStrike's global IT outage was affecting their organization, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported July 23.
Due to the incident, 50,000 computers at Penn were rendered offline and staff were greeted with the "blue screen of death," a bright blue screen with a few lines of text, when they tried logging onto their computers.
"We've simulated plans for the event that our electronic medical records become inoperable. But we were less prepared for the complete inability to use a computer," John Keogh, MD, an anesthesiologist who oversees all surgeries and procedures at Penn's flagship Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania told the Inquirer.
Dozens of Penn staffers logged into an emergency Zoom call in the middle of the night, and began realizing that its systems had been affected by the CrowdStrike incident. According to the article, Penn Medicine relies on CrowdStrike to protect tens of thousands of servers and PCs at its organization.
How to continue hospital operations?
The hospital's first patients were scheduled to arrive around 5:30 a.m. Uncertain about the duration of the outages, hospital executives initially decided to admit patients, keeping them for up to an hour and a half in the hope that the situation would be resolved. However, as it became evident that the outages would not be fixed that day, they began canceling appointments.
According to the news outlet, the outage forced Penn to reschedule almost a full day of nonessential procedures and appointments, and restricted its physicians to care for only their sickest patients while taking medical notes on paper.
Penn staff began preparing paper records for physicians to document cases and ascertaining whether the imaging machines essential for treating critical emergencies, such as strokes, heart attacks and other time-sensitive health conditions, were still operational. According to Dr. Keogh, those machines used a different system and remained operational.
Additionally, with patients' electronic medical records inaccessible, Penn Medicine had to rely on backup PDFs of patient schedules to triage those with appointments.
In response to the incident, Penn has extended evening and weekend hours at some clinics and said it is committing to rescheduling most canceled appointments within two weeks. Penn is also discussing using more iOS devices since the incident mostly affected computers using Windows.