David Linehan: A powerful reminder of how fortunate I am to be a part of URMC
David Linehan, Chief Executive Officer at the University of Rochester Medical Center, shared a post on LinkedIn:
“I first got the call from Strong Memorial Hospital CEO Kathy Parrinello at 4:47 a.m. on Friday. By 5 a.m., about 60 URMC institutional leaders and IT experts were on a command center call with a unified focus of minimizing disruption to patient care.
It was the start of a potentially difficult day, but it only served as a powerful reminder of how fortunate I am to be a part of URMC.
The CrowdStrike global outage had disrupted our systems. But together, in the face of an unexpected and sudden challenge, our URMC teams rose to the occasion and demonstrated the strength and spirit of our organization. As a result, the impact to our patients was minimal.
From those early hours, our IT and clinical leaders jumped into action, ensuring emergency and inpatient care continued without interruption and restoring critical systems within a few hours. Elective procedures and outpatient services continued safely with some delays Friday, and all UR Medicine patient facilities were open as scheduled the next day.
It was truly inspiring to see the dedication and teamwork displayed by so many, and the intense collaboration between IT and operations teams. With a precise and focused recovery plan, and innovative problem-solving, we were able to quickly overcome multiple obstacles.
Our IT teams worked tirelessly through the weekend, manually rebooting computers at a rate of 300 to 500 per hour, so that by Monday evening, about 20,000 of our nearly 22,000 affected computers and servers were operational.
In addition, Rochester Regional Health does not use CrowdStrike the way URMC does and had minimal impacts. The fact that their IT team called to offer help tells you something about this community and our shared patient-centered values.
A sincere thank you to all of our faculty and staff for their patience, flexibility, and unwavering dedication in navigating this challenge.
You all displayed immense collaboration with creative solutions that ensured we could provide the safe and high-quality care our community relies on us to deliver each day. The resilience displayed by each and every member of our URMC team has been simply amazing.
The global outage could have been one of the troublesome moments of my early tenure as CEO, but it turned out to be just another moment that made me immensely proud to be part of the URMC family and the Rochester community.”
Source: David Linehan/LinkedIn