An electronic health record outage across dozens of Community Health Systems facilities reportedly stemming from an accidental database deletion has now been resolved, the company confirmed Monday to Fierce Healthcare.
The outage was first reported by Tennessee press last Wednesday in regard to Tennova Healthcare, one of CHS’ subsidiary systems. That story and others attributed the tech issues to the provider of CHS’ Cerner EHR, Oracle Health, with a Tennova representative telling Knox News that “Cerner engineers mistakenly deleted critical storage connected to a key database, leading to an outage.”
Though stored patient data were affected, CHS hospitals shifted to downtime procedures—paper records—during the interruption. In total, 39 hospitals were impacted by the incident, Tomi Galin, CHS’ executive vice president of corporate communications and marketing, said Monday.
The downtime procedures were reportedly expected to remain in place until Monday evening. As of that morning, Galin said that the Cerner system outage had “been resolved ahead of the expected recovery schedule” and that teams at the affected hospitals are spending the day reestablishing full functionality and a return to their normal operations.
“Despite this being a major outage, our hospitals were able to maintain services with no material impact,” Galin said. “We are proud of our clinical and support teams who worked through the multi-day outage with professionalism and a commitment to delivering high-quality, safe care for patients.”
CHS owns or leases 72 hospitals and more than 1,000 sites of care across 14 states. It reported $12.6 billion in net operating revenue and a $516 million net loss across 2024, and just last week announced higher-than-expected first-quarter revenues on strong flu season volumes.
In recent years, the hospital chain has pursued a modernization initiative that executives said would heavily rely on Oracle Health’s Cerner EHR system, which it would marry with the tech company’s other financial, supply chain and human capital management systems.
Fierce Healthcare has reached out to Oracle Health for additional comment on the cause of the outage and its remediation and will update this story with the company's response.
The IT vendor was recently in the hot seat over a data breach in which hospitals’ patient data were reportedly accessed from legacy Cerner servers, from which the company is currently transferring data over to a new platform built on its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. The company did not initially confirm that incident, which has since garnered lawsuits and a U.S. Cybersecurity and infrastructure Security Agency warning for enterprise customers outlining recommendations to reduce credential compromise risk.