Spokane hospitals impacted by worldwide CrowdStrike outages, MultiCare to postpone elective surgeries

Spokane hospitals are working to regain their full abilities following CrowdStrike computer outages that caused major problems across the world Friday .

MultiCare announced Friday morning that elective surgeries at Deaconess and Valley Hospitals scheduled for the day would be postponed .

“All elective surgeries at both Deaconess and Valley Hospital that were scheduled for today will be rescheduled for a later date, but emergent and urgent procedures can and will be performed safely,” the hospital system said in a statement.

Emergency rooms at the two hospitals remained open. Rockwood Clinics rescheduled all appointments between 7-9 a.m. Indigo Urgent Care was open for walk-in patients.

All patients impacted by these disruptions will be contacted by MultiCare, the healthcare system said.

Providence also said in a statement that the CrowdStrike outages impacted them.

“Our IT teams have been working overnight to respond to the issue and have restored key functionality in the Epic electronic health record so that nurses, physicians and other caregivers can access patient records and perform clinical documentation. However, other clinical applications and workstations continue to be impacted, and our IT teams are working to restore these services as soon as possible,” Providence said in a statement.

According to the hospital system “patient safety and access to care” is their top priority. Providence was moving forward with all scheduled procedures and appointments.

In a statement, Kootenai Health said they were impacted by the outage, but its effect on patients were “minimal.”

“Late in the evening on July 18, Kootenai Health experienced an extensive computer system outage. This appears to be related to a widespread, global technology outage that impacted many industries including airlines, health care, banks, and media outlets. Staff members used down-time procedures and maintained continuity of patient care. Most systems are back online and Kootenai Health’s IT team is working on systematic restoration based on a prioritization of patient care, ancillary and support services,” the Kootenai Health statement reads.

A flawed update to users of software security company CrowdStrike caused the worldwide Windows OS-related problems .