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Larry Ellison, co-founder and executive chairman of Oracle Corp., addressed attendees during the Oracle OpenWorld 2018 conference held in San Francisco on October 22, 2018.
During a recent incident, Oracle engineers inadvertently caused a five-day disruption in software services at various Community Health Systems (CHS) hospitals, forcing these facilities to revert to traditional paper-based patient documentation.
According to CHS representatives, the outage affected “several” hospitals, which led to the activation of “downtime procedures.” Reports from Becker’s Hospital Review indicated that up to 45 hospitals were impacted.
The outage commenced on April 23 due to the accidental deletion of essential storage linked to a primary database by engineers performing maintenance tasks, as stated by a CHS spokesperson. The issue was resolved on the following Monday and was confirmed not to be linked to any cyberattack or security breach.
Headquartered in Tennessee, CHS operates 72 hospitals across 14 states, as detailed on the organization’s website.
The spokesperson remarked on the situation, stating, “Despite this being a major outage, our hospitals were able to maintain services with no material impact. We are proud of our clinical and support teams who worked through the multi-day outage with professionalism and a commitment to delivering high-quality, safe care for patients.”
As Oracle’s systems have now been restored, CHS reported that the affected hospitals are focused on “re-establishing full functionality and returning to normal operations and procedures.”
Oracle’s issues with CHS come on the heels of a prior nationwide outage affecting their federal electronic health record system. The company has faced significant challenges in its long-term deployment of electronic health records (EHR) with the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), including ongoing concerns over patient safety. This led the agency to initiate a strategic review of Cerner in 2021, even before Oracle’s acquisition, and to temporarily pause deployment of the software in 2023.
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