BURLINGTON, Vt. – By late morning on Oct. 28, staff at the University of Vermont Medical Center noticed the hospital’s phone system wasn’t working.Then the internet went down, and the Burlington-based center's technical infrastructure with it.
Employees lost access to databases, digital health records, scheduling systems and other online tools they rely on for patient care.Administrators scrambled to keep the hospital operational — cancelling non-urgent appointments, reverting to pen-and-paper record keeping and rerouting some critical care patients to nearby hospitals.In its main laboratory, which runs about 8,000 tests a day, employees printed or hand-wrote results and carried them across facilities to specialists.