Power to computer systems serving St. Luke’s Health System was lost for about 24 hours on June 30, forcing staff to rely on paper and pencil for some records.

According to St. Luke’s, both the primary and backup power supplies for the health care company’s bank of more than 600 computer servers at a Boise facility failed in the early morning hours and couldn’t be repaired until early the next morning.

Power to the servers failed at around 3:30 a.m. Brett Tyler, the information technology site leader for St. Luke’s Magic Valley Medical Center, said the Twin Falls hospital had some applications on websites hosted by outside groups, so access to some information, such as patient records, wasn’t lost. Access to others, including e-mail, was lost system-wide, including in Twin Falls and Ketchum.

St. Luke’s Magic Valley spokeswoman Jody Tremblay said patients with June 30 appointments at the four Mountain States Tumor Institute offices were rescheduled because all MSTI information was on the Boise servers.

Employees established an incident command center to handle the emergency, something they practice on a periodic basis. By 8 a.m., they had transitioned to using paper forms and no major incidents resulted, Tremblay said. Heart monitors and other computerized health equipment were not affected.

Tyler didn’t know what caused the outage or how soon after initial power loss the backup system failed. He said the main components that failed in the power units have been replaced. St. Luke’s IT staff are conducting an analysis and should have a report by mid-August.

“We’re doing a post-action review,” Tyler said. “The most important thing is to learn from this.”

One improvement is already in the works:In its new TwinFalls hospital building set to open next year, St. Luke’s already planned to install a data center that can serve as a backup for the system in case the Boise center loses power.

Laura Lundquist may be reached at llundquist@magicvalley.com or 735-3376.