Hospital's electronic records system goes off line after AT&T outage

WILMINGTON, NC (WECT) - Doctors and nurses had to use "the old-fashioned way" of documenting patient care for a seven hour period Thursday at New Hanover Regional Medical Center after a regional outage with AT&T.

A hospital spokesperson says patient care continued as normal despite the lack of access to the hospital's relatively new, electronic health record system called "NHRMC Connect."

Access to the system stopped just before 1 p.m. Thursday. The hospital used it's down-time procedures, which included documenting all patient information and instructions on paper. The information was entered into the system once it came up again around 8 p.m.

Carolyn Fisher with New Hanover Regional Medical Center says the staff is not unfamiliar with these downtime procedures, but not for such a large block of time as happened Thursday.

"They performed wonderfully well," Carolyn Fisher said.

Fisher says everything is back to normal today.

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