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Comment by charles_f | Hacker News Reader

> Took down our entire emergency department

What does this mean? Did the power go down? Is all the equipment connected? Or is it the insurance software that can't run do nothing gets done? Maybe you can't access patient files anymore but is that taking down the whole thing?

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Every computer entered a bluescreen loop. We are dependent on Epic for placing orders, for nursing staff to know what needs to be done, for viewing records, for transmitting and interpreting radiology machines. It's how we know the current state of the department and where each patient (out of 50+ people we are simultaneously treating) is at. Our equipment still works but we're flying blind and having to shout orders at each other and have no way to send radiology images to other doctors for consultation.

Yeah in Radiology we depend on Epic and a remote reading service called VRAD. VRAD runs on AWS and went down just after 0130 hrs EST. Without Epic & VRAD we were pretty helpless.

Can't imagine how stressful this must have been for Radiology. I had two patients waiting on CT read with expectation to discharge if no acute findings. Had to let them know we had no clear estimate for when that would be, and might not even know when the read comes back if we can't access epic.

Have a family member in crit care who was getting a sepsis workup on a patient when this all happened. They somehow got plain film working offline after a bit of effort.

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