Some Philadelphia hospitals impacted by global IT outage | What this means for you

PHILADELPHIA (WPVI) -- The Crowdstrike outage that impacted offices, businesses and banks around the world also impacted hospitals.

Several Philadelphia-area hospital systems were among those impacted, including Penn Medicine, Main Line Health and Virtua Health.

Derek Rigby saw the impact first-hand when he went to the emergency room.

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"I had to go to the ER for a vaccine thinking I'd be in and out real quick. I got there at 6 a.m. and just left. So a six-hour wait time," he said while speaking to Action News at around noon.

Though the emergency room was slower, it was still able to stay open by using some old-school methods.

"Everything was written by hand," of how he was processed for care at Penn Medicine. "They had to write multiple labels out for everything."

Penn Medicine's hospitals and emergency rooms stayed open and fully staffed, but some elective procedures had to be canceled or rescheduled. Patients were notified by either phone call or text.

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In a statement to Action News, a spokesperson for Penn Medicine said, "Our teams are working to restore systems and return to normal operations as quickly as possible."

It was the same goal for Mainline Health. The health system's corporate headquarters in Radnor Township became home base to its IT team that worked to get things fully restored. While the main medical records system stayed up and running, some Mainline Health computers were affected.

"We had some elective surgeries and they were postponed but they've been rescheduled now," said Dr. Jon Stallkamp, Chief Medical Officer of Mainline Health.

Mainline's hospitals and emergency rooms stayed open.

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"Any acute surgery, any trauma, we continued to work with," said Stallkamp. "If someone was delivering a baby, we kept moving forward with that."

Mainline Health's four hospitals were prepared for the type of system outage that no one saw coming.

"We actually plan. We drill for these events," said Stallkamp. "So we were ready. We had our team quickly assembled."

Mainline Health expects its systems to be 100% back to normal by the end of the weekend.

Virtua Health had brief interruptions overnight but implemented its backup systems and policies to keep services going.

Virtua issued a statement to Action News saying, in part, "Our teams continue to work diligently to ensure patient safety, which is our top priority, and to avoid any inconvenience for those we serve."

Domenic Grisolia didn't notice any disruptions to service while visiting a family member in one of Virtua's hospitals.

"It seemed perfectly fine," he said. "Our brother's in there in ICU and everything seems smooth. They didn't seem to have a glitch."

Children's Hospital of Philadelphia tells us the Crowdstrike outage caused what they said in a statement were "minimal disruptions."

Not all hospitals, though, were impacted by the outage.

Temple Health, Cooper Hospital, Tower Health (which includes St. Christopher's Hospital for Children), and Jefferson Health, which includes Einstein, were all operating normally on Friday.