Last week’s CrowdStrike software crash left some health systems in emergency downtime situations, while others ended up delaying patients’ medical procedures, according to Healthcare Dive. The crash has been characterized in Becker’s as “worse than a cyberattack.” The American Hospital Association also said: “These disruptions are resulting in some clinical procedure delays, diversions, or cancellations. Impact is also being felt indirectly as a result of local emergency call centers being down.” Some scheduling, check-in, and billing procedures were reportedly impacted as well. CrowdStrike software detects and prevents cyberattacks on more than 1 million devices used within healthcare organizations. The company has a list of FAQs as well as fixes and recovery information available on a remediation hub.
More on this later: The frequency of technology hiccups and cyberattacks could well be a forecast for the future, according to Axios. If the Change Healthcare disruption from earlier this year is any indication, provider organizations will need to assume any tech meltdown could take weeks or months of recovery.