Kentucky hospitals share how global technology outage impacted them

LEXINGTON, Ky. (WKYT)—A worldwide technology outage impacted healthcare entities across the nation Friday. Several of our hospitals and clinics in the Commonwealth were no exception.

One of those directly affected is UK HealthCare.

“We have a team that is used to handling things like this, so we got a call around 2:00 a.m.,” said Dr. Mark Hoffman, UK HealthCare’s Chief Medical Officer. “Incident command was set up, and that’s when the problem was first identified, and we all came in and got to work.”

Hoffman says the outage is primarily impacting providers’ workstations, where they document information or make orders.

“That system, for the most part, with limited disruption, was usable through most of this, but the number of workstations we were able to use was decreased by the outage,” he said.

With fewer workstations, hospital staff have had to cancel elective procedures and prioritize certain departments, such as the ICU and labor and delivery.

“We have to be thoughtful in our decision-making and how we plan for things like this. This is not the first time we’ve had to deal with something like this. We do drills and we have systems built to prepare us for when these things happen,” Hoffman added.

In addition to UK Healthcare, other local hospitals, including Baptist Health and CHI St. Joseph Health, are making statements about this outage:

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