Bluewater Health, and its partners in the Erie St. Clair health care region, are reporting a regional digital system outage.
The hospital's chief of communications and public affairs, Keith Marnoch, said it started during the early morning hours Monday.
"The outage impacts our hospital's digital systems, which includes email and many patient information interfaces," Marnoch said. "Medical equipment is online and we can continue to provide our safe and quality care, but it's just the systems that surround that equipment that is in question."
When asked if the issue was IT [information technology] related or if the system was hacked, Marnoch had this to say.
"Well, we're not sure about the source necessarily, but our electronic support systems being down means that care teams are manually recording and documenting patient information and visits," he said. "So, this will likely result in longer than usual wait times."
When speaking with Sarnia News Today at mid-afternoon Monday, Marnoch said no appointments had been cancelled, but some were being rescheduled.
"We're keeping an eye on that and we'll have to determine whether, or not, we get to the point of doing that. We are still looking at tomorrow [Tuesday] and beyond," he said.
The hospital is asking patients seeking non-urgent care to seek out other community resources, like their local healthcare provider or walk-in clinic.
Marnoch was unable to provide specifics on Emergency Room wait times.
"When we're in these situations, we're trying to keep pressure on the systems to a minimum if possible," Marnoch said. "Obviously, if you need to come to the hospital for an emergency, definitely come, there's no question about that. But, if it's something that you're not quite sure about, and there's other ways to deal with it, we would recommend that you do that in these circumstances."
Patients are also being asked to bring health cards with them to the hospital.
"Sometimes people who come on recurring visits don't always do that and they rely on the systems that are actually impacted with this outage. So, we need people to have their health cards with them when they come physically to the hospital," Marnoch said.
Bluewater Health continues to assess the situation and Marnoch said an incident command system has been put together to monitor and manage the outage.