My Train Wreck

When I got into the ED yesterday, they tell me that the Electronic Medical Records system is down. Since the health care field is moving toward using this, there are whole sections of the hospital that use only electronic records. The ED is one of those. So when they say that the computers are down, what they're really saying is that we have to write all our lab/x-ray/CT/consult orders by hand, and have couriers deliver them where they're supposed to go. And we have no way of knowing what the results are unless a courier brings them back. Take x-rays for example. The image is taken digitally, read on the computer, and the report is sent back to the ED in an e-mail-like fashion. When the system crashes, they have to find x-ray film, the radiologist has to do the old fashioned holding up to to a big light thing to read it, and then they have to send a hand written report back to us. The result of all this is chaos and everything taking hours instead of minutes.
On top of this, one of our three CT scanners broke earlier this week, and has not yet been repaired. Since three is barely more than enough, we've been making do with just the two, it's just slowing us down a little.
A few hours into the shift, the computers finally come back online. We all rejoice, and everyone goes into overdrive trying to re-enter everything in the computer systems. We're doing alright when, twenty minuted after the computers come back, the power goes out. Yes, we were sitting in pitch black in the hospital for a little bit. Of course, the hospital has generators that come online quickly, so people didn't die.
Now, this power outage did two things. First, it took the computers back offline. Not only did this mean we were back in our previous predicament, it meant that all those bajillion orders we were frantically entering just disappeared. The best part is, we weren't sure what made it through and what didn't. So for the rest of the shift we were getting half our labs back, or discovering that no labs had been done at all. Second, when the power went out, it scrambled one of the two remaining CT scanners. When I left, there was a 5-6 hour delay for anyone needing a CT, and the low-priority section of the ED had discharged only one patient in the last four hours because they couldn't get CTs.
The ED was a disaster. Since everything was going so slowly, our patient load backed up out of control. There were people laying and sitting wherever there was an empty space in the hallways. People were being treated wherever they were. It was like a war movie or something.
Hopefully today will be better.