Patient Care Technology Disruptions Associated With the CrowdStrike Outage.

Area of Science:

• Digital Health Infrastructure
• Cybersecurity in Healthcare
• Network Availability Measurement

Background:

• Modern healthcare delivery relies heavily on digital infrastructure.
• Technology outages can significantly disrupt clinical care and patient services.

Purpose of the Study:

• To assess the impact of a specific faulty software update on healthcare delivery organization networks.
• To determine network availability before, during, and after the CrowdStrike software update on July 19, 2024.

Main Methods:

• Cross-sectional study analyzing internet-connected network availability of US hospitals.
• Utilized internet scanning techniques and Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) endpoint assessments.
• Monitored network responsiveness two weeks prior to, during, and two weeks after the software update.

Main Results:

• Out of 2232 hospitals, 759 (34.0%) experienced network outages post-update.
• 1098 distinct network services were affected, including 21.8% direct patient-facing services.
• A significant portion of affected services (57.5%) could not be classified.

Conclusions:

• Widespread technology outages, like the CrowdStrike incident, demonstrably impact critical patient-facing network services.
• Internet measurement techniques show promise for monitoring and studying digital healthcare infrastructure resilience.
• Ensuring the stability of digital health infrastructure is crucial for uninterrupted patient care.