St. Elizabeth’s Hospital and other HSHS facilities dealing with major technology outage
Hospital Sisters Health System, which operates five hospitals and other medical facilities in southwestern Illinois, is experiencing a major outage involving websites, internet service, telephones and computer applications.
Patients have reported an inability to access online charts or reach doctors, and employees are using alternative email addresses in some cases.
The technology outage started Sunday morning, according to Facebook posts by HSHS and Prevea Health, a physicians group that HSHS partners with at its Wisconsin hospitals and other facilities.
On Tuesday afternoon, calls to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in O’Fallon were being answered by a switchboard operator, but they weren’t always getting through to office extensions.
“We are under a pretty widespread outage that our teams are working on,” said Kelly Barbeau, Illinois Division director of marketing and communications for HSHS, a non-profit health system based in Springfield. “They are digging into it, but they do not have a cause at this time.”
Hospitals and other facilities are following “downtime policies and procedures,” according to Barbeau. Those have been developed to deal with all kinds of outages, including the ones caused by storms.
Other HSHS facilities in southwestern Illinois include St. Joseph’s Hospital in Breese, St. Joseph’s Hospital in Highland, Holy Family Hospital in Greenville, St. Francis Hospital in Litchfield, Prairie Heart Institute at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in O’Fallon and HSHS Medical Group offices.
Barbeau sent the following email after being asked if surgeries and other medical procedures have had to be canceled:
“As soon as we were alerted to this issue, internal operations teams engaged immediately to confirm scheduled procedures with as many patients as possible, which resulted in minimal cancellations. We continue to coordinate with providers to proceed with scheduling necessary appointments for their patients.”
The HSHS website was down Tuesday afternoon. In its place was a temporary page (hshsupdates.org) described as a “one-stop source for information regarding the temporary system outage.”
The following statement was posted at noon Tuesday:
“HSHS hospitals, HSHS Medical Group and Prairie Cardiovascular clinics continue to work through our temporary system outage. Currently, access to our phone system is sporadic and MyChart communication is temporarily unavailable.
“Our hospitals have well-established downtime policies and procedures when we experience technology outages and we are following those protocols and continuing to care for our patients with the same level of quality, safe and effective care that has defined our Franciscan health ministry for decades.
“We acknowledge this outage is causing inconvenience for some patients and that services may take longer to schedule or receive.
“We are grateful to our caregivers, colleagues and physicians, who are doing everything possible to ensure we can continue to serve our community while we work diligently to resolve the outages. We will provide updates on the situation as they become available.”
HSHS operates a total of 15 hospitals in Illinois and Wisconsin.
