Code grey called at RVH to work out issue with new digital system

RVH, Georgian Bay General, Collingwood General and Marine, and Headwaters Health Care Centre all reported issues leading to delays.

The Royal Victoria Regional Health Centre (RVH) in Barrie activated a code grey alert on Wednesday.

“A code grey is a title we give when there’s an infrastructure outage at our hospital,” says Dave Brewin, VP of Digital Health and Regional Chief Information Officer for RVH. “In this case, it was a digital infrastructure outage. This was our system our doctors and nurses use every day.”

During a code grey, Brewin tells CTV News there’s an extensive set of procedures and processes the teams go through to ensure clinical care isn’t interrupted.

“Every code grey is a little different.”

In this particular case, Brewin says it was a planned outage for updating the hospital’s core system for things like labs, diagnostic imaging and ordering pharmaceuticals.

What happened was as the hospital was bringing the system back live, the team working on it found an issue with the system, which is when RVH continued forward with a planned outage and was forced to go into unplanned time.

“The code grey is called an unplanned outage,” Brewin explains. “That allowed us to rally the troops, get the right people on, follow a set of key procedures and processes, get the right people around, supporting clinical frontlines.”

The timeline looked like this: the hospital took the system down on Wednesday at 12:30 a.m. and planned to bring it back live at 6 a.m., but RVH was in an outage and the code grey was called at around 2 p.m.

That digital infrastructure, called MEDITECH Expanse, is the core information system doctors and nurses use in their day-to-day practices. RVH says it has a backup system, which was used and allowed staff to continue accessing patient information and supporting patient care during the outage. However, it does not offer the same functionality and integrated workflows as the original system.

“Patients would’ve seen some longer lineups at registration, longer waits in the emerg department,” Brewin says.

It wasn’t just RVH that had the outage but multiple health service providers across the region that RVH provides digital health services to. Those are Georgian Bay General Hospital, Collingwood General and Marine Hospital and Headwaters Health Care Centre. All of the hospitals are in a partnership and use the same operating system.

While Brewin says the outage slowed down work and put some extra stress on frontline staff, but due to the planned nature of the outage, staff were able to resume regular operation smoothly.

“Because it was a planned downtime, we knew exactly what the problem was and what steps we had to do to take to fix it,” says Brewin. “It was just a matter of time before we had to get the system back up live again.”

Brewin also says it was an optimal training opportunity for staff in case of an unexpected outage or downtime.

“It is a great chance to test our downtime procedures. In our industry, we have a maturity scale that goes from one to seven and these four hospitals are a six from a digital maturity, so you can imagine a lot of what people do day to day is on digital systems so when those systems go down, it does cause issues because you’re used to not being on paper,” Brewin says. “So having people go back to paper and using back-up systems, is a really good practice for other outages we may have and will have along the way.”

As a result of the new system in place, the patient portal got, what Brewin calls, “a new facelift.”

The hundreds of thousands of patients who use the system can expect to have an easier time seeing their results and appointments.

All operations were back up and running as of around 9 p.m. on Wednesday.