Oracle Health data center maintenance triggered EHR outage at CHS

Community Health Systems has reportedly experienced IT outages at multiple hospitals after data accessed by its Oracle Health electronic health records system was deleted. 

The outage, which lasted five days, went largely unreported and was resolved Monday evening, CNBC reported.

Based in Franklin, Tennessee, CHS operates 72 hospitals in 14 states, according to its website.

On April 23, CBS News reported that CHS Grandview Medical Center in Birmingham, Alabama, confirmed an accidental outage.

Hospital spokesperson Leisha Harris said Oracle Health engineers inadvertently deleted patient information during routine maintenance at one of its data centers, and reportedly stated that the outage would be resolved by Monday evening, according to the story.

“Loss of access to patient records for any reason, malicious or non-malicious, is a serious concern and may be disruptive to patient care,” said John Riggi, the American Hospital Association’s national advisor for cybersecurity and risk, in a social media post about the incident. 

Oracle Health has reportedly been subject to malicious compromises of legacy Cerner Corporation and legacy Oracle cloud systems.

Several hospitals and other healthcare clients received a letter from Seema Verma, executive vice president and general manager of Oracle Health, last month confirming the compromise of legacy Cerner data migration servers.

Meanwhile, an alleged, unconfirmed breach of Oracle Cloud federated SSO login servers may have also compromised millions of records from more than 140,000 corporate and government agency domains.

Two years ago, CHS was affected by a malicious data breach of its GoAnywhere managed file transfer software when attackers exploited the zero-day vulnerability in a hacking scheme that victimized hundreds of enterprises using Fortra’s MFT tool worldwide. 

At the time of reporting, CHS said it was the first healthcare organization to report a breach in the global attack.

Healthcare IT News has reached out to both CHS and Oracle Health for statements and will update this story if they respond.

Andrea Fox is senior editor of Healthcare IT News.
Email: [email protected]
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.