Business
Indiana hospital temporarily turns patients away after EMR outage
NEWS IN BRIEF — Posted June 15, 2009
Officials at Methodist Hospital and Indiana University Hospital in Indianapolis found out the difficult effects of an electronic medical records outage after a power surge knocked out the hospital system's EMR system on June 1.
The task of entering the data by hand proved to be too much after several hours. A backlog of data entry work forced the hospital to turn away patients. Ambulances were diverted to other hospitals for nearly two hours as the staff played catch-up. Walk-in patients were still accepted, however.
Note: This item originally appeared at http://www.ama-assn.org/amednews/2009/06/15/bibf0615.htm.