Medical Appointments, Surgeries Axed At U.S. Hospitals Amid CrowdStrike Outage

Nonemergency surgeries, procedures and medical visits were canceled or suspended at multiple hospitals across the country Friday amid a global software outage that has kept health care workers from accessing medical records, prescriptions, scheduling, and other electronic tools and documents.

Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, the state’s largest, said it has canceled “all previously scheduled non-urgent surgeries, procedures, and medical visits” due to the outage linked to the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike.

The outage is said to have primarily affected computers using the CrowdStrike software with Microsoft’s Windows operating system.

The hospital said in a statement that its clinics and emergency departments remain open to patients with urgent health concerns, “and we continue to care for all patients currently receiving care in our hospitals.”

Penn Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania also said that it is canceling and will reschedule some appointments Friday due to the outage. The medical system said in a statement that it is “making every effort to contact patients whose appointments need to be canceled.”

Even crucial appointments were reportedly being canceled at some facilities, however.

In Kentucky, a 73-year-old man’s daughter told The Associated Press that his emergency open heart surgery at Baptist Hospital in Paducah was abruptly canceled early Friday due to the system outage.

“It’s an emergency surgery, so if anything happens, it would be as a result of not having the surgery this morning,” said Alison Baulos. A representative for Baptist Health did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s requests for comment.

Many hospitals and medical centers appeared to be operating as usual or recovering after earlier disruptions.

Texas’ Harris Health System, which is the state’s largest public primary care health network, canceled all outpatient clinic appointments and elective hospital procedures for several hours on Friday before resuming normal operations, though with some services still offline, it said in a statement. Hospital visitation and patient information were among some of the services suspended at some of its facilities due to the outage.

Other major hospitals and health care systems said they are working through the disruptions with minimal to no impacts on patients.

This included the Mount Sinai Health System in New York, which said in a public statement late Friday morning that all of its appointments remain planned “unless you hear from us.”

“We will notify you if your non-urgent appointment or procedure needs to be rescheduled due to the global technology outage,” it said.

Dartmouth Health, which runs a system of hospitals, clinics and health care services across New Hampshire and Vermont, also said in a statement that it’s experiencing a “widespread outage of multiple systems” but that it “is making every effort to ensure there is minimal disruption.”

It wasn’t clear whether any appointments have been canceled or postponed as a result, and representatives did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s requests for comment.

Here’s a list of other major health care systems and hospitals that HuffPost has heard from as of early Friday afternoon:

HCA Healthcare, the nation’s largest health system, said it “has not been directly impacted by CrowdStrike’s technology issue and we are working with our vendors to understand any issues they may be facing.”

CommonSpirit Health, which operates 140 hospitals, said some of its facilities have been affected and that patients are being contacted if their appointments are affected.

Trinity Health, which operates a network of 101 hospitals, said “only a small percentage” of its servers have been affected. “The majority of the technical issues have been remediated, and there has been no impact to patient safety.”

The Veterans Health Administration said there has been no known impact on health care operations from the outage. VA Press Secretary Terrence Hayes encouraged any veteran needing support, including those impacted by challenges at non-VA health care facilities, to call 1-800-MYVA411 or visit their local VA medical center for assistance.

Baptist Health System’s hospitals in San Antonio and New Braunfels, Texas, have not been impacted and are operating normally, according to a spokesperson.

Jackson Health System in Miami said it has not been substantially impacted and that patient care has not been affected “in any of our hospitals.”