Marianne Klaas

The recent fire and electrical outage at Seattle’s Fisher Plaza data center caused well-publicized troubles for a number of major websites. But it also disrupted one of the region’s main hospital systems, Swedish Medical Center.

Doctors, nurses and staff at Swedish’s three main hospitals and other facilities in Seattle lost their connection to electronic medical records, internet, email and, in some cases, phone and pager service for four and a half hours on the morning of July 3. No patients were ever in danger as a result of the outage, Swedish said. But the medical center says the Fisher Plaza fire prompted it to look at backup data-center capacity as insurance against future disruptions.

After learning about the Fisher Plaza fire in the early hours of July 3, Swedish evacuated the small crew that monitors its servers there. At 5 a.m. that morning, Swedish lost its connection to the data center. That meant staff at Swedish hospitals at First Hill, Cherry Hill and Ballard, an Issaquah emergency center, and a visiting-nurse program could not modify or update electronic medical records, said Marianne Klaas, the medical center’s administrative director for safety, who was on call at the time.

About a third of the medical center’s phone system is VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol), which was knocked out. Swedish facilities had about 600 patients at the time, she said.

Swedish doctors and staff went to a backup plan of using pens and paper to record medical data. Each hospital unit has access to a computer that runs on a parallel system and allows for reading medical records in read-only mode, Klaas said. The hospitals distributed emergency cell phones to units that lost phone and pager service. The connection to Fisher Plaza was restored at 9:30 that morning, but it took several more hours to enter all the paper data back into the electronic records system.

Klaas said Swedish Medical Center’s network of over 30 primary care clinics was closed for the July 4 holiday. If they had been open for business, the disruption would have been a lot worse.

“We were very fortunate this happened on a holiday,” Klaas said.

Klaas said Swedish, which transitioned to electronic medical records in 2007 and 2008, will be looking at ways to build redundancy into its data center plans.

“It’s a wake-up call. I still think the infrastructure is solid, but this internal problem — when there’s fire, smoke and you have to have water to put it out — it forces those of us who use that building to have additional contingency plans,” she said.

As more hospitals around the country make the transition to electronic medical records, the issue of having adequate data-center support looms larger. If the computer servers that support such systems go down, hospital staff can be cut off from patient files, doctors’ schedules and prescription data.

“We’ve gotten everyone out of the mode of working on paper,” said Tom Fritz, CEO of Inland Northwest Health Services, a Spokane-based nonprofit providing health-care technology and other services to 38 regional hospitals (not including Swedish).

Fritz said it’s “intolerable” when electronic records are suddenly not available. At the same time, he said, many hospitals today are in a difficult financial position, making extra capital expenditures a tough sell.

“It’s hard to justify the expense of two data centers,” Fritz said.

Currently, only 1.5 percent of U.S. hospitals have a “comprehensive” electronic records system in all medical units, and 7.6 percent have a basic system in at least one unit, according to a survey published in April by the New England Journal of Medicine. But the Obama administration has made electronic medical records a priority, and is putting some $19 billion in economic stimulus money toward building a national electronic health records system.

Meanwhile, at the Fisher Plaza data center, “we have everything up and running, and we are operating,” said Ed Doyne, director of customer development for Egis Real Estate Services, which provides engineering support for Fisher Plaza.

“We have the number of generators we need to stay in operation, plus one on each of the two systems we’re running,” he said.

Doyne said “the end solution is a couple months away” but declined to provide details. He referred further questions to Century Pacific, LP, which provides asset management services to Fisher Communications for Fisher Plaza. Century Pacific did not immediately return a phone call. 

Adhost Internet LLC, one of the colocation providers at Fisher Plaza, said in a recent update that Fisher engineers will be performing maintenance this weekend on the interim generators that have been powering the data center since the fire and outage.

The Fisher Plaza data center fire also caused disruptions for major websites, including Microsoft Bing Travel, Authorize.net and Allrecipes.com.

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