advertisement

Advocate's computer system crashes

A computer system used at Advocate Health Care hospitals was working again Saturday afternoon after it had crashed earlier in the day.

The Care Connection system, which handles patient data at Advocate's 12 Chicago-area hospitals, went down after 5 a.m., but didn't interrupt patient care, said hospital spokeswoman Stephanie Johnson.

Some hospitals brought in extra staff to manually write down patient orders while the system was down, Johnson said.

Service had returned by 4 p.m., she said.

“We were just going back to old school, calling in our backup resources and making sure everything continued. Anything can crash, you just have to have a backup plan,” Johnson said.

The problem originated from a hardware failure with a computer server run by Cerner Corp., the system vendor. The issue was resolved and all data was restored Saturday, said Cerner spokeswoman Elizabeth Holzhauer.

She said they were not going to speculate on the cause of the crash.