Paper charts, canceled appointments at VMFH clinics, hospitals as network outage drags on

Computer networks remained offline Tuesday at hospitals and clinics in the Virginia Mason Franciscan Health system in Tacoma and across Puget Sound and other parts of the country following an IT security incident involving its parent company.

A statement from Virginia Mason Franciscan Health on Monday acknowledged that Chicago-based CommonSpirit Health was “managing an IT security incident which is impacting some of our facilities.”

The health system’s computer network remained down Tuesday morning, with health care workers telling The News Tribune that the disruption was having serious impact on normal functions such as charting, lab results reporting, history gathering, obtaining records on allergy information and more.

The patient portal MyChart also remained offline.

“Staff and MDs are making do with circa-1980s paper charting,” said one tipster working at St. Anthony Hospital in Gig Harbor, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution.

“We don’t have any access to the electronic medical record. We can’t pull it up. We can’t get patients’ histories,” the employee told The News Tribune in a phone interview. “We can’t order things or put orders in from pharmacy. It’s all a paper record going on right now.”

He added, “It’s just not a good situation to be getting care because everything happens much more slowly and inefficiently.”

He noted that the employees had not been told anything more than it was an IT incident.

The outage appeared to be affecting medical sites nationwide under the CommonSpirit Health operating umbrella, including North Dakota, Nebraska, Tennessee, Texas and Iowa, based on media reports from those states.

VMFH hospitals in the Puget Sound area include St. Clare in Lakewood; St. Joseph and CHI Franciscan Rehabilitation Hospital, both in Tacoma; St. Elizabeth in Enumclaw; St. Anthony in Gig Harbor; St. Michael in Silverdale; Virginia Mason Hospital and Seattle Medical Center in Seattle; St. Anne in Burien; and St. Francis in Federal Way.

VMFH in a statement Monday said certain online systems had been taken down as a precautionary measure, and that some patients faced rescheduling.

Robert Layfield, a local patient, told The News Tribune via email that rescheduling was an issue.

“As a patient, they are unable to see my appointments nor have information to call patients to reschedule,” he told The News Tribune via email. “I went in Monday for appointment and found it canceled.”

He said he’d waited six months for the appointment and was unable to reschedule with the system down.

“All the staff were very helpful, and seemed frustrated as well,” he added.

A patient who visited an area Franciscan Prompt Care told The News Tribune physicians were hand-writing prescriptions for patients to take to pharmacies.

Inside the CHI Franciscan Family Medicine Clinic in Bremerton on Tuesday, front desk receptionists were using paper lists to mark off patients as they arrived for appointments, and physicians were writing patient history notes on clipboards upon intake.

Staff said they did not know when the computer network would be back online.

CommonSpirit Health formed in 2019 through alignment of Catholic Health Initiatives and Dignity Health. It has become one of the largest nonprofit health systems in the U.S., with more than 1,000 care sites in 21 states, serving 20 million patients, according to its website.

Virginia Mason Franciscan Health completed the merger of their Seattle and Tacoma-based health systems in January 2021.