A province-wide power outage caused non-emergency, scheduled surgeries and some lab work to be postponed at Alberta Health Services facilities on Monday.
Network issues began to be resolved around 2 p.m., according to AHS.
“The technical issue causing the AHS network outage in the province has been resolved and teams are working quickly to restore all clinical systems, which will take several hours,” AHS said in a tweet.
Service was first restored in critical patient care areas such as emergency departments.
AHS said it is reviewing the cause of the outage so it can work to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
The technical issue that caused the outage of the AHS network in the province has been resolved and teams are working quickly to restore all clinical systems, which will take several hours.
We’re looking at the cause of the problem to learn how we can prevent it from happening in the future.
— Alberta Health Services (@AHS_media) January 23, 2023
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On Monday morning, some scheduled, non-emergency operations were postponed “as a precaution.” AHS said affected patients would be contacted to rebook their procedures.
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Laboratory services were also affected and reduced at some sites, with emergency results being communicated by fax or phone rather than through AHS’s internal communications system.
AHS said routine lab appointments had to be rescheduled because hospitals had shifted to focusing only on critical and statistical lab requests.
By early afternoon, 811 Health Link was only available “in limited capacity” with longer wait times. The service was operating normally as of 1:30 p.m
Emergency Medical Services dispatchers are operating backup procedures and calls to 911 are not affected, AHS said. Those with an emergency were asked to call 911.
“Our teams are currently using downtime procedures that are put in place immediately if the electronic system is not available,” AHS said in a statement. “This ensures we can continue to provide patient care.”
According to AHS, “all Connect Care clinical systems and applications (were) disrupted.”
“We’ve been tracking (the outage) for several hours now,” Dr. John Cowell, AHS’s official administrator, said at an unrelated news conference Monday morning.
“Clinical support – Connect Care and NetCare – is not working and of course everyone knows that’s not a good thing.”
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Cowell said there was no higher priority than getting clinical systems back up and running.
We currently have a province-wide network outage that is affecting some services. 8-1-1 Health Link is unable to receive calls at this time. If you have an emergency, call 9-1-1.
We are working to restore service and will provide updates as soon as possible.
— Alberta Health Services (@AHS_media) January 23, 2023
“We are working to restore service and will provide updates as soon as possible,” AHS said.
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