The CrowdStrike outage last week had repercussions felt around the world. Some companies adapted and recovered quickly from the outage, while others continued to struggle for several days. We want to share the experience we had with a large, assisted living and memory care facility in the Memphis area.
In the early hours of Friday, July 19, 2024, the CrowdStrike kernel update affected the Facility’s EHR/business operations system, rendering the system inaccessible by the Facility’s business and healthcare departments.
This posed a critical problem for the Facility, particularly, due to the unavailability of medication lists stored in the EHR for residents in their assisted living and memory care units.
Although the Facility could not access these documents in their EHR, we had worked with the Facility to set up a backup system several months before to store critical data locally on a secure on-site server at the facility, which updated every 8 hours. This proactive approach allowed us to restore access to critical patient care data such as medication lists within 30 minutes of notification on Friday morning.
The Facility was able to leverage the backup documentation and paper charting until the EHR system was fully restored Friday night.
This is a testament of how planning ahead for interruptions and having a strong partnership with your IT team can make a meaningful impact on operations during critical moments.
