PORTLAND, Maine — MaineHealth patients who tried to log into their MyChart accounts early Wednesday morning likely got an error message.
A MaineHealth representative confirmed to NEWS CENTER Maine that a hardware failure caused an outage of the health system's patient information system for about four and a half hours Wednesday morning. The hospital system then proactively took the system offline intermittently to fix the issue, the representative said later in the afternoon.
At least three surgeries were canceled due to the outage, according to MaineHealth. Officials said those surgeries have been rescheduled for later this week.
"Our care team have detailed procedures they follow during any downtime event (planned or unplanned) to ensure we can continue to provide the same safe, high quality care we do each day," the hospital system said in a statement. "We regret the inconvenience for our patients."
The representative said the outages will not affect those receiving emergency or urgent care.
MaineHealth officials said the health system has backup systems in place, but there may have been some delays in accessing information within its hospitals Wednesday morning.
A hospital spokesperson told NEWS CENTER Maine just before 6:30 p.m. patients' electronic medical record and MyChart patient portal are both back up and running.