UPDATE: Another Puget Sound area health system’s outage part of planned maintenance

Another health system’s computer network outage Thursday morning was part of a planned maintenance event.

Bremerton-based Peninsula Community Health Services, which serves Kitsap and Mason counties and the Key Peninsula area with medical, behavioral and dental clinic support, sent out an area-wide alert about its system outage.

The outage was unrelated to the ongoing Virginia Mason Franciscan Health network outage, which entered its fourth day.

Keith Stauffer, chief information officer for PCHS, told The News Tribune the outage at his system was part of a planned reboot.

“We found some old configuration files that were slowing down the systems, which was kind of having a minor impact on our exam rooms,” he said. “So we decided that at lunchtime when patients were out of the exam rooms, we would just reboot the system, just to clear everything up and get the configuration files back in place — a 20 minute outage, that was it.”

The flash alert was sent to alert patients in case the outage was longer, he added.

“We just wanted to make sure that we were communicating with everybody to let people know that you could potentially run into an issue trying to get the registration desk.”

PCHS has clinics in east and downtown Bremerton, Port Orchard, Poulsbo and Belfair and runs vaccine drives and a mobile medical clinic in areas such as Key Peninsula.