When 20,000 devices were paralyzed by a bad update, a Georgia health system turned to Apple

Apple devices will power a hospital in Georgia, a first for the company as it continues its push into the health-care sector. 

Emory Healthcare on Thursday announced that its Emory Hillandale Hospital will be the first U.S. hospital that runs on Apple products, including the iPad, iPhone, Apple Watch, iMac and Mac mini. The devices will also integrate with software from Epic, the leading electronic health record vendor in the nation.  

Hillandale is using Apple products because they are user-friendly, require less IT support, offer cybersecurity advantages and have long-lasting hardware and battery life, Emory executives told CNBC.

Since this is new territory for the health system, Emory said it will closely monitor the devices to ensure they improve the organization’s quality of care.  

“It can certainly be a game changer that’s not been done anywhere else in the country,” Emory Healthcare CEO Dr. Joon Lee said in an interview. “And like everything else, it’s not going to be without its challenges, but it really opens the door to multiple possibilities.”

Emory Healthcare is an academic health system in Georgia that operates 10 hospitals and supports roughly 26,400 employees. Its Hillandale facility is a 100-bed community hospital on the outskirts of the greater Atlanta metro area. 

“At Apple, we believe in technology’s power to improve lives,” Dr. Sumbul Desai, vice president of health at Apple, said in a statement to CNBC. “We’re thrilled that Emory Hillandale Hospital is using Apple products to deliver exceptional care — because doctors and nurses should have the best technology in the world to serve their patients.”

The health system’s interest in using more Apple products was partially inspired by the major CrowdStrike outage that rocked businesses, including Emory, last July, said Dr. Ravi Thadhani, the executive vice president for health affairs of Emory University.  

Thadhani said more than 20,000 of the health system’s devices were “paralyzed” by a faulty CrowdStrike software update, but notably, all of its Apple products were still working. In the aftermath of the outage, executives asked engineers from Apple and Epic to visit Emory and explore a deeper integration. 

“They were working on each other already, you could get Epic on an Apple device, but it wasn’t quick and it wasn’t seamless,” Thadhani said. “And so they came, they descended here.” 

Epic is Emory’s electronic health record, or EHR, provider. EHRs are digital versions of a patient’s medical history that are updated by doctors and nurses. The software is often referred to as the “central nervous system” of a health-care organization, said Seth Howard, Epic’s executive vice president of research and development.

Howard said Epic has worked with Apple for many years, deploying apps for the iPhone as far back as 2010. Last year, the company released Epic on Mac, which made its complete suite of applications available on Apple’s computer operating system macOS. 

“The Epic on Mac project was really an extension and natural next step for us on this journey with Apple,” Howard said in an interview.

Emory was an early adopter. 

Before Emory decided to roll out Apple devices throughout an entire hospital, it conducted a smaller pilot across one floor of a facility. Thadhani said the feedback from doctors and nurses was “phenomenal,” which gave the health system confidence to expand the scope.

If the launch at Hillandale is a success, Lee said the health system could deploy Apple products across other Emory facilities in the future. 

“Certainly our intent and hope is that it will show a difference, and that we can expand and it will also be a model for other health systems across the country,” he said.