Network outage affects phone, internet service at Chicago's Lurie Children's Hospital
CHICAGO (CBS) -- A major network outage has caused more than a day of confusion for patients at Lurie Children's Hospital since Wednesday morning.
The network outage impacted phone and internet service at the hospital in the Streeterville neighborhood, and was not over as of late Thursday morning.
The phone lines at Lurie's three other locations – a primary care center at 1450 N. Halsted St., a primary care center in Glenview, and an outpatient center in Skokie – were also down Thursday morning.
An internal memo obtained by CBS 2 revealed Lurie began experiencing service disruptions early on Wednesday.
"Out of an abundance of caution, we proactively disabled our phone, email, and electronic medical record systems," the memo stated.
Sources said due to the outage, people trying to reach their doctor because of a medical issue cannot do so. People trying to reach someone inside the hospital cannot do so by dialing the hospital's general phone numbers, so anyone in an emergency should instead call 911.
For staff, it's difficult to order prescriptions, document vaccines, schedule procedures and check test results.
But the outage was bigger than just phones not working. It also knocked out the hospital's online chart system – canceling appointments and procedures.
The outage also meant pharmacies had limitations on digital patient charts.
A source said the hospital was performing a "partial list of surgeries" on Thursday, meaning some scheduled surgeries, but not all.
It was unclear what caused the original service disruptions, or how soon Lurie would have its phones, electronic medical records, and other systems up and running again.
One parent, Ellen Brown, said her infant son's surgery was not going to happen due to whatever was behind the outage.
"I cannot access a single thing," said Brown.
Upon calling the hospital, Brown and hundreds of patients got a recorded message saying in part, "Information management is investigating issues with phones, and is currently working to resolve the issue." And when Brown tried to access her son's MyChart, an error message popped up.
"If you try to log onto MyChart, it says that there's actually a server error - and that their servers are completely down," said Brown.
The hospital's entire network crashed, leaving Brown and her 14-month-old son's surgery in limbo. Doctors scheduled the surgery a month ago.
"So 24 hours prior to surgery, they call you. They go through, you know, all the instructions, - you know, not-eating instructions, bathing instructions, if you can be there and hold their hand during surgery, you know, everything - they cover in 24 hours," said Brown, "and then, particularly today, we didn't receive that call at all."
Brown could not get a hold of anyone from the hospital, because internet and phone services were down. The hospital on Facebook told parents they are working on fixing the problem.
Yet there was no word late Wednesday on how the outage happened or when the system would be back up and running.
"A beg and plea for just any sort of information that we can get is really helpful," said Brown.
A hospital employee, who asked to remain anonymous, said they haven't used paper charts in years, so when patients come in, "not only do we not know what they're coming in for, who's coming in, when they're supposed to come in, we have essentially no information about them."
The employee of 20 years said this wasn't the first time the hospital has experienced an outage, but it is the first time one has lasted this long.
"There was a time where we would have our paper charts still," they said. "We don't have that anymore, and we're prepared for this to happen for a couple of hours or for half a day, but for it to go on for days on end is really hard."
Brown said while land line phones might have been down at Lurie, she questioned why no one could pick up cellphones to reach out about her son's surgery – an event so important in his life.
"I would have thought that someone would have reached out; some sort of an urgent line; that somebody has some sort of a cellphone that works inside the building," said Brown.
As of 9:30 a.m. Thursday, work was still under way to solve the problem. But it was not fixed, and it was nearing 24 hours since the problem began – leaving many to wonder if there was something or someone behind the network failure.
The longer the system was down, the more the backups for surgeries stacked up.
