News Summary

Island Health experienced a significant system-wide blackout of its electronic records system, affecting all hospitals within its network, including major facilities in Victoria and Nanaimo. The disruption, which lasted over an hour, originated from a data center hosted by Oracle Health/Cerner in eastern Canada. This outage prevented medical staff from accessing patient histories and lab test results, prompting a shift to ‘downtime procedures.’ Despite the challenges, no patients were reportedly affected. Island Health is collaborating with Oracle Health to investigate the cause and aims to implement better mitigation strategies for future incidents. The outage also highlighted the need for a more robust cloud-based backup system, as current server-based solutions are viewed as more susceptible to security risks.