Full Moon Friday the 13th: Computers down at Vermont's largest hospital

A health IT "glitch" hit in Vermont on Full Moon Friday the 13th (have some werewolf with your bad luck!)

Dark Shadows' Quentin Collins (David Selby) in a foul full-moon mood.

Note, however, that "bad luck" has little or nothing to do with mission-critical healthcare IT mass outages.  Mismanagement often does:

http://www.wcax.com/story/25773022/computers-down-at-vermonts-largest-hospital

Computers down at Vermont's largest hospital

Posted: Jun 13, 2014 4:12 PM EST Updated: Jun 13, 2014 4:12 PM EST

By WCAX News

BURLINGTON, Vt. -
A major, systemwide computer problem at Fletcher Allen Health Care in Burlington Friday.

The hospital says the computer system went down at 9:45 a.m. The glitch means doctors and nurses could not enter patient information into computers.

"Glitch" is an unfortunate euphemism for potentially harmful or deadly computer malfunctions, often due to mismanagement of that technology. See query link http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/search/label/glitch.

Hospital spokesperson Mike Noble says information is now being recorded manually [i.e., on paper - ed.] Noble says the staff continues to provide the same care as normal and no surgeries were canceled because of the computer issue.

Noble says the issue appears to be an internal problem and not something from an outside computer provider.

It’s not known when the problem will be corrected.

This is yet another "the systems that revolutionize healthcare against all of paper's ills have all gone down, we don't know when they will be fixed, but patient care has not been compromised because we are resorting to paper" story (more at query link http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/search/label/Patient%20care%20has%20not%20been%20compromised). 

-- SS