Last Wednesday evening, a computer outage swept through several hospitals in the San Diego area, leading to a brief halt in ambulance deliveries to some facilities. This incident contrasted with recent disruptions at Tri-City Medical Center and Scripps Health in 2021, as officials clarified that this outage wasn't caused by ransom-seeking hackers.
Sharp HealthCare's Grossmont and Memorial Hospital campuses had to pause ambulance arrivals for approximately two hours until systems were back online just after 6 p.m. Similarly, UC San Diego Health faced the same outage for the same duration. However, Dr. Chris Longhurst, the organization’s chief medical officer, assured that ambulance diversions weren't necessary at their facilities.
Dr. Longhurst explained, “A power outage at one of Epic’s data centers caused a brief system shutdown, but we swiftly resumed operations. Patient care remained unaffected as we are well-prepared for such scenarios and undergo regular training.”
An Epic spokesperson, choosing to remain anonymous, confirmed via email on Wednesday night that a data center in San Jose utilized by the medical records company encountered a temporary "power issue," affecting nine of its clients.