Concord Hospital CEO Mike Green said the hospital has been struggling for a week with computer system failures but, as of yesterday, everything was working again.

Green said the hospital was adding memory to its storage area network on May 28 and something went wrong - possibly because of faulty hardware or a bad installation. In the days that followed, the systems that access that network began to fail.

Those used by nurses and pharmacists in the hospital and by providers to make orders for lab work and other tests crashed.

"People had to revert to paper processes," Green said. "It was a lot of work, particularly for pharmacists who had to do things manually that are ordinarily done by the electronic system."

The systems that handle electronic medical records and financial information in physicians' offices weren't affected.

The hospital financial system, which processes about $1.5 million in charges each day, was briefly offline but quickly repaired, Green said.

He said staff members were working around the clock to correct the problems and to ensure that the quick shift to manual processes posed no safety concerns for patients. The systems are new, some installed within six months, and are state of the art for the industry.

"It's remarkable how quickly you become reliant on that technology," he said.

Green said the issues highlighted the fact that some nurses at the hospital have only ever used electronic processes for keeping patient charts and don't have the experience of using manual systems to fall back on when the systems crash. The hospital plans to create training and procedural standards for what to do in case that this happens again.

Green did not have an estimate for how much the computer crash would cost the hospital, though he said it was something that would be accounted for through minor adjustments in the organization. He said patients were not likely aware of the problems.

"This was a painful learning experience," he said. "Between dealing with H1N1 and dealing with this, I am very confident in saying we are the best prepared hospital in the state to deal with any disaster."