Alberta Health Services says network outage resolved

Health officialssaya network outage affectingAlberta Health Services (AHS) has beenresolved and services are "carefully being restored" withpriority being given to critical patient areas, like emergency departments.

Earlier, AHS, which delivers health care across the province, saidanoutage wasaffecting some of its services. It said some elective, non-urgent surgeries werebeing postponed as a precaution and lab services hadalso been affected.

In an update Monday afternoon, the agency said the network outage was resolved.Health Link 811 is fully available and wait times are back to normal, according to a statement.

"Sites continue to use downtime procedures as systems come back online," the agency said.

"Some non-urgent surgeries were postponed as a precaution to ensure emergency and urgent surgeries could continue. We are in the process of rebooking those impacted patients.

"We are reviewing the network outage to determine root cause so that we can avoid such issues in the future. We appreciate everyone's patience."

AHS said a further update would be provided when all services have been restored.

The outage hadan impact across the province.

Earlier, asenior official with AHS saiddoctors and staff at hospitals wereusing paper charts, whiteboards and phone calls to communicate with each other during the outage.

Dr. Sid Viner, vice-president and medical director for clinical operations with AHS, saidthe computer systems were largely down in hospitals.

But he added health-care workers are well-versed in downtime procedures, which are put in place when an electronic system isn't available, and staff were prioritizing urgent care for patients.

During the outage, AHS saidits emergency dispatch wasfunctioning with backup procedures and calls to 911 were not affected.

In an update on Monday night, AHS officials said they willask a third party to review the cause of the network outage.

"The third-party review, which will begin shortly, will help us determine the root cause of the network outage and identify any improvements that will prevent such outages happening in the future," AHS said in a statement.

"There is no indication that the technical outage was caused by hacking or any form of cyber-attack."