This article is reprinted from the Speak Out Now healthcare newsletter at Kaiser and Highland Hospitals in Oakland, CA.
On July 19, cybersecurity company CrowdStrike released buggy software that caused many computers internationally that run on the Microsoft Windows operating system to crash. The outage impacted millions of computers across the world and had varying effects on hospitals and health systems across the country, including the Bay Area’s Alameda Health System (AHS) and Kaiser Permanente.
The outage had both AHS and Kaiser Permanente management scrambling in the middle of the night to evaluate the impact on operations. Emails were sent out to Highland and Kaiser employees to reboot computers, with an added reminder that hospital staff needed to report to work the following day.
In the end, in the midst of this chaos, it wasn’t managers who kept things going. It was healthcare workers in hospitals across the country that kept hospitals running, as well as IT workers who figured out what was going on and resolved the issue.
Click here to read the article printed in the 07-29-24 Healthcare Newsletter
