Outages Hamper John Muir Electronic Health Record System

John Muir Health experienced intermittent outages of its electronic health record systems Monday at both its Walnut Creek and Concord campuses, hospital officials confirmed.  The hospitals' electronic health record system began having problems around 11 a.m. and was "still off and on" as of 7:30 p.m. Monday, said John Muir spokesman Ben Drew, although the organization expected to have the system completely running again within a couple of hours.  Drew said that no patients were turned away and it had no impact on hospital admissions or discharges.

However, the situation led to the hospitals having to rely on paper records in the interim, he said.  It also resulted in a call to divert patients from John Muir to other area hospitals for about two hours, from shortly before noon to nearly 2 p.m., according to Jason Sorrick, a spokesperson for ambulance company American Medical Response.  Drew however said that ambulances going to John Muir hospitals were actually only on diversion for 10 minutes from 11:15 a.m. to 11:25 a.m., but that there was "a miscommunication" when the Concord hospital did not clear the call for diversion as it should have...