Doctors in the LBJ Hospital Emergency Room weren’t treating patients Saturday for sometime after the electronic medical records system went down for several hours.
The system stopped working just before 12 and was down for more than 2 hours. Patients who filled the ER that day when the system was down told KHJ News that the doctors on duty sat in their rooms and stopped seeing patients. The patients were told that nothing could be done because doctors couldn’t access patient records.
The pharmacy also stopped issuing prescriptions for the same reason.
LBJ Hospital sources said that usually if the electronic medical records system fails, a back up system would kick in. But this didn’t happen on Saturday.
When a KHJ News reporter visited the ER after the system was restored, patients expressed their frustration at the long wait.
One woman said she was used to waiting for hours during a hospital visit but this past Saturday was longer than usual. She said she was thankful for having the “patience of Job” to put up with the long wait, the mother said the situation should never have happened in the first place.
A mother of two from the western side of the island questioned how a multi million dollar system failed and there was no back up.
She said after years of “literally writing things down and working everything manually this so called system went down Saturday they literally did nothing. Patients sat in the ER waiting for the system to come back up because there was no way of tracking any of their records.”
She advised that LBJ Hospital needs to make sure that they do not depend solely on the electronic medical records system because Saturday was a good example of what happens when it goes down.
The woman said the ER doctors could not even write a doctor’s excuse note for a US Army reservist, “something so simple,” because the system was inaccessible.
KHJ News has sent questions to the LBJ CEO and IT manager about the failure.
