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John Hollenhorst reportingThe computers at the University of Utah Hospital are back to normal now, but yesterday it was quite a different story. Computers were down nearly the whole day and that created serious difficulties for the medical staff.
So what went wrong? Officials say there was little or no impact on patients, but computers were down mid-morning to early evening.
The emergency room diverted trauma patients to other hospitals all because something went wrong a mile or so away, in a basement in Research Park.
The basement is the nerve center for 300 computer programs and systems. They handle everything from doctors dictating notes to nurses checking prescriptions.
One of the 800 servers had a hiccup, an apparent hardware failure. Jim Livingston, a computer expert of the University of Utah, says, "It sent a bunch of erroneous traffic out on our network that caused our network to not be able to communicate with the rest of the institution."
Medical equipment was unaffected. Treatment was not halted, but computer work stations were useless. Doctors and nurses reverted to old-fashioned medicine. "They were pulling out books again, they were looking at charts, they were going back to the old way of, you know, 'Where's the book on this type of medication?' So probably, if anything, our patients had extra attention yesterday with the computers shutdown." Said Chris Nelson, spokesman for the University of Utah Hospital.
But they admit it was like stepping back 10 years in medical efficiency. As a precaution, the emergency room diverted trauma patients to other hospitals. "In my opinion, patient safety was not compromised in this process," said Livingston.
If the server problem re-appears, they believe they can isolate it so it won't bring down the network again. Livingston said, "We brought together the best and brightest minds on campus to really troubleshoot this process and this problem, and people are very confident that we understand the issue."
By chance, the computer glitch hit the same morning as the Nevada earthquake. If there had been major injuries, hospital officials say they could have easily brought the emergency room back to full service. "Quite honestly, in a lot of disaster situations, we expect our computers wouldn't be working anyway," Nelson said.
The computer glitch also brought down the University of Utah's main Web site. If you had trouble viewing the web site, it wasn't your computer's problem, it was theirs. And today, it should be working properly.
