Hacker News Reader

Comment by ibeff | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

Without access to Epic we can't place med orders, look up patient records, discharge patients from the hospital, enter them into our system, really much of anything. Every provider in the emergency department is on their computer placing orders and doing work when not interacting with a patient. Like most hospitals in this country, our entire workflow depends on Epic. We couldn't even run blood tests because the lab was down too.

The STEMI was stabilized, it's more that it was scary to lose every machine in the department at once while intubating a crashing patient. You're flying blind in a lot of ways.

If the computer system was down, and medicine was needed to save a life, would either some protocol dictate grabbing the medicine and dealing with the paperwork or consequence later? If protocol didn’t allow for discussion, would staff start breaking protocol to save life?

You can skip paperwork but what if the patient is allergic to a medicine and you need to check medical records? Or you need to call for a surgeon but VoIP is down? Etc…

My father's coworker died from being in hospital for observation after few scratches in car accident because they were accidentally given medication they were allergic to.

So, yeah. The paperwork can save lives too and not sadly red tape is bad.

Otherwise you may go o hospital to pickup your friend and be told to wait for coroner

> Surely none of the medical devices needed to treat a heart attack are Windows PCs connected to the internet?

Wouldn't that be nice

I'm guessing they were being treated over the phone as the systems went down. I've been through a similar situation, the person on the phone will give step by step instructions while waiting for an ambulance to arrive.

Sounds like with the systems being down the call would have been cut off which sounds horrible.

No, treating in person. But we can't function as a department without computers. You call cardiology (on another floor) and none of their computers are working to be able review the patients records. You could take the EKG printout and run it to them, but we're just telling them lab results from what we can remember before our machines all bluescreened. The lab's computers were down so we can't do blood tests. Nursing staff knows what to do next by looking at the board or their computer. Without that you're just a room full of people shouting things at each other, and definitely can't see the 3-4x patients an hour you're expected to. Doctors and midlevels rely on epic to place med orders too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com