Hospital turns away ambulances because EHR system goes down

ahhhh, so the government must do something about it.

In the world's most impoverished nations, the majority of the populations do not have access to clean water, adequate housing or basic health care. These countries are paying debt service to wealthy nations and institutions at the expense of providing these basic services to their citizens. Some of the health care instution may need debt relief. Read more click

Maybe the ambulance patients weren't Methodist?

I would never go to this hospital. These are the same guys that paralyzed a woman by giving her 10X the epidural dosage and killed a few babies with heparin overdoses.

It makes sense that they were still able to take patients who arrived on foot. One might assume that such patients could provide their own health background and information (or that someone who came with them would be able to do that). If someone is coming in on an ambulance, there's the person may or may not be conscious. If the ER staff can't get access to the patient's medical history, they could make big mistakes that could cause harm (e.g., administering a drug to which the patient is allergic).

While not every patient in an ambulance is unable to speak or convey medical information, the ER staff would have a feel for how often ambulance-delivered patients arrive in a condition in which they can provide their own health history. Rather than trying to pick and choose which patients to accept (based on their condition during transport), it makes sense that they would opt to choose to turn away all ambulances.

There may be a golden opportunity for a business start-up here: a medical call center that exists solely to pull up EMR information. Each hospital could register users who could call in to a special number (unique for each hospital), identify themselves (through some authentication mechanism), and request that records be transmitted (or request specific information while on the phone). It would be a fantastic backup if the hospital's own systems ever were to go down again. [Request: if you act on this idea and make it happen, please remember poor old HikingStick. Thanks.]

Hospitals systems are now massively interconnected now because of HL7 or system interfacing, and usually this is all driven by the EMR.
When you enter a large hospital you are given a patient ID and sometimes an MPI(master patient index). This is the launching point for every service you will get at the facility. Imagine this example. You go in and the doc orders blood work. When they draw blood for the lab, a bar code is printed and put on the vial, that vial is loaded in the blood analyzer and then unloaded. Idealy, no human enters information from one system to the next. The anaylzer scans the vial, processes the blood and then updates your medical record. At the same time, when that sample is ordered, your record is shown in the EMR as waiting for blood work results. When those results come in, your status changes, so the doctors know to look at the results.
It is estimated that an in-patient patient needs ~150 to 170 procedures/processes per day. This is very very difficult to do on a paper system.

Here is the problem. Not all EMRs are created equal. Some vendors realize the importance they play in hospital system roll, others do not.

Look at Kaiser Permanante for example. They have been converting to Epic at a cost of ~4 billion dollars and have seen their uptime decrease.

The hospital administators probably determined that because of difficulties processing work, patient care was being compromised and shut the ED. This was a smart move.

Maybe it just means that the efficiencies created by EMRs were so great that going back to paper required so much extra manpower that it was not practical for non-critical patients. This may or may not be the case (since these systems and hospitals are amazingly complex beasts), but if true, this would just mean that EMRs can be indispensable tools for efficient, safe patient care.