Patient Care Technology Disruptions Associated With the CrowdStrike Outage

What patient care outcomes were associated with a major international technology outage?In this cross-sectional study of 2232 hospitals with available data, network disruptions coinciding with a faulty cyber security software update on July 19, 2024, were measured at 759 US hospitals. Of the nearly 1100 internet-based services examined, 239 (21.8%) were characterized as corresponding with direct patient care functionality.These findings suggest that widespread technology failures affecting health care infrastructure may have commensurate negative impacts on patient care systems.

Corresponding Author: Jeffrey L. Tully, MD, Center for Healthcare Cybersecurity, University of California, 9500 Gilman Dr, La Jolla, CA 92093 (jtully@health.ucsd.edu).

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