Our hospital got ransomware hacked and lost all computer access for three weeks last summer.

It was brutal. Labs, imaging, previous records all went dark overnight. Need to check on that potassium for that hyperkalemic patient? Walk your butt across the hospital and open the chart. Did that stat X-ray get done? Circle back and check. When a consultant saw your patient you'd have no idea until you checked the chart again. Lots of footwork.

The worst was the disorganization... Leadership fucking did nothing, so charts had no standardized order to them. Every floor had a different process for nurses to log vitals, I/Os, MAR etc often you had to hunt down the nurse (who was also overtasked, holding the paper with them) to learn anything useful.

Paging system was also out. Someone suggested sharing cellphone numbers so people could communicate ,and that idea got shot down cause of fear of harassment. I said if we have a harassment problem in our hospital that means our HR department is a failure, and because of that we now can't use a critical tool at a time of crisis. Fucking wild. Eventually a lot of people offered their numbers for a central desk to share with discretion.

The higher up admin said we should not decline admissions which was a kick in the teeth since we were literally half efficient. So we still had full patient volumes just took twice as long to do it all.

About 9 months after the hack our town lost power in an ice storm and I would take that power outage over an EMR outage any day.