Sutter Health network restored; bereaved daughter recounts ordeal
Sut ter Health said service has returned to normal af ter a network outage, but its effects are likely to linger for a Santa Clara woman who said Wednesday she couldn’t reach a hospice’s 24- hour hotline for many hours after her father’s death at an assisted- living facility.
Dur ing the outage, which began about 10: 30 p. m. Monday, a Sutter spokesperson said sites such as the system’s Santa Rosa center saw relatively little disruption, but that San Francisco’s California Medical Pacific Center was forced to delay some surgeries and Berkeley’s Alta Bates had to cancel some surgeries.
“As of 2 a. m., all Sutter Health information systems are back up and running fol lowing an outage caused by an activation of the fire suppression system in one of our data centers,” Sutter communications director Nancy Turner said in a statement Wednesday. “Our technical teams worked around the clock to resolve this issue and fully restore system access. All Sutter Health data remains secure.”
Turner said procedures “were in place, allowing our caregivers and office staff to continue providing quality patient care. We apologize for any challenges this situation may have caused, and we appreciate the dedicated work of our caregivers and staff in following downtime processes.”
According to tweets, access to Sutter’s My Health Online system connecting patients to health data and doctors was restored and stable about 9 a. m. Wednesday.
But the outage inconvenienced many patients, including Santa Clara resident Susan Harkema, who said she spent Monday working to make her father comfortable during what was his last day alive at a Sunnyvale assisted- living facility.
“It was a tough day trying to get him comfortable. … He was actively dying all day and evening Monday,” she said. “We finally got him comfortable around 6 p. m. with medications.”
When her father died at 12:43 a. m. Tuesday, she called the 24- hour hotline for Sutter Health’s Hospice of the Valley to summon a nurse to acknowledge the death so his body could be re- leased to a local crematorium.
But the outage had cut of f the hotline, as well as backup numbers Harkema frantically tried dialing for a nurse and a physician’s personal cell numbers.
“This situation was it was horrifying. When you call expecting someone to pick up when you need them most and it just rings and rings, it was really a scramble and we were panicking.”
A hospice nurse finally arrived between 9:30 and 10 a. m. Tuesday to clear her father’s body. By then, Harkema had learned of the network outage, but said Wednesday that she was still shaken by the experience.
“I couldn’t find some solution. It makes you feel like in the final thing, I let my father down,” she said. “I saw him all the way to the end, but there was this additional part that I couldn’t see him through.”
Harkema said her own work in the health care field and experience with technology is informing her plan to share a full write- up of the incident with Sutter to boost its systems’ resiliency.
“It’s basically an IT failure debrief. I want to give them what the experience was from a service standpoint but technically, so they can put some kind of fail- safes in,” Harkema said.
“My father was dead, he had passed away. Other people might have needed pain medicine or their person might have been suffering, and they wouldn’t have had a way to get anything. I’m sure we weren’t the only ones. … It still takes people, connections between people, to make things happen. I work in health care technology, in a different field, but you can’t replace people. You have to have human connections.”