how automated healthcare fails, how you'd know, and what to do at each tier — every claim sourced, reviewed continuously
39 documented failures, each tagged with the layers it crossed and the lowest degradation tier care actually fell to.
Ontario's Auditor General found every AI scribe on the province's approved vendor list had fabricated, wrong or missing content in procurement tests, including 12 of 20 recording the wrong drug.
A pharmacy chain's AI voice and text assistant for refills mispronounced medications, ordered wrong dosages and duplicate refills, and gave callers no keypad alternative; after hundreds of complaints the chain pulled it back.
Some Libre 3 and 3 Plus continuous glucose sensors read lower than actual glucose; FDA classified the correction Class I after reports of 860 serious injuries and 7 deaths.
A race condition in DynamoDB's DNS automation broke a core AWS region for about 15 hours. Some cloud-hosted EHR users slowed or went to paper; others saw nothing.
After AI polyp detection was introduced, the adenoma detection rate of standard non-AI colonoscopy fell from 28.4% to 22.4%.
Non-clinical analogue. An AI coding agent with write access ran destructive commands against a live database despite an instruction to freeze changes, then said rollback was impossible when it was not.
A grid collapse cut power to continental Spain and Portugal for about ten hours. Hospitals largely held on generators; care outside them did not.
An automated sepsis alert triggered a protocol for large-volume IV fluids in a dialysis patient; the nurse objected, was told to follow the protocol, and a physician intervened.
A Class I software correction found that backlogged EHR-to-pump automated programming requests could load stale rate, dose or volume parameters.
CISA and FDA reported that a low-cost patient monitor's firmware contained hidden functionality that could allow remote access and sent patient data to an external address; independent researchers later judged it an insecure design rather than an intentional backdoor.
Researchers and an AP investigation found OpenAI's Whisper speech-to-text model inserting fabricated sentences, and a Whisper-based clinical scribe used by over 30,000 clinicians erased the source audio, removing the way to check.
A faulty Rapid Response Content update to CrowdStrike's Falcon sensor crashed about 8.5 million Windows devices worldwide. Outside-in measurement found disrupted services at 759 of 2,232 US hospitals studied.
PathDevices → Connectivity & data → Human handoff
Ransomware hit Synnovis, the pathology provider for several south-east London NHS trusts and GP practices. Blood testing and matching collapsed, more than 11,000 appointments and procedures were postponed, O-type blood ran short nationally, and one death was later partly attributed to a delayed result.
PathConnectivity & data → Human handoff
A ransomware attack took Ascension's electronic records offline for about five weeks. Clinicians told KFF Health News of medication errors and delayed lab results, and one said he had no training for the attack; Ascension said its care teams were trained for such disruptions.
Attackers used stolen credentials on a Change Healthcare Citrix remote-access portal that had no multi-factor authentication, then deployed ransomware nine days later. Disconnecting the clearinghouse stalled pharmacy claims, medical claims and payments across the US.
PathConnectivity & data → Human handoff
A class action alleges UnitedHealth used naviHealth's nH Predict model to cut off post-acute care; a Senate investigation found UnitedHealthcare's post-acute denial rate nearly tripled while it automated prior authorization.
In a controlled experiment, 27 radiologists' accuracy on mammograms fell sharply when a purported AI suggested an incorrect BI-RADS category.
Air conditioning tripped at both trust data centres on the UK's record-heat day. Clinical IT went down and the trust ran on paper for weeks.
Philips recalled about 15 million breathing devices because PE-PUR foam could degrade into particles and chemicals the patient could inhale; remediation ran years and ended in a consent decree.
An independent validation of Epic's proprietary sepsis score found it far less accurate than the vendor reported: it missed 67% of sepsis cases while alerting on 18% of all hospitalizations.
A month-long ransomware attack on a health system with about 25% of regional inpatient discharges drove patients and ambulances to two unaffected academic EDs, raising their census, waits and stroke activations.
PathConnectivity & data → Human handoff
Freezing weather knocked out generation and forced the largest controlled load shed in US history. Power loss spread to water systems and hospitals, and to patients at home on powered medical equipment.
PathPower → Devices → Human handoff
Paired SpO2/SaO2 data showed occult hypoxemia missed by pulse oximetry about three times as often in Black as in White patients, delaying treatment decisions.
After go-live, the new EHR routed more than 11,000 clinical orders to a hidden queue instead of the intended service, without telling the ordering clinician; VHA identified 149 adverse events.
A security incident led UHS to suspend user access to IT applications across its US operations; facilities ran on offline documentation for up to several weeks.
Weeks after its first COVID-19 admissions, the University of Michigan paused Epic sepsis alerts because dataset shift produced spurious alerting; its clinical AI committee decommissioned the model.
A widely used commercial risk algorithm assigned Black patients the same scores as healthier White patients, because it was trained to predict health-care spending, which is lower for Black patients at the same level of need.
Non-clinical analogue. The human operator meant to back up an automated driving system was looking at her phone; the NTSB cited automation complacency.
Irma knocked out the transformer feeding a nursing home's air conditioning. 14 residents died; 12 deaths were ruled homicides.
A self-spreading ransomware worm infected 34 English trusts and 603 primary-care and other NHS organisations, and at least 46 more trusts were disrupted. Thousands of appointments were cancelled and five hospitals diverted ambulances.
PathConnectivity & data → Devices → Human handoff
Ransomware made the EHR inaccessible; the hospital moved to paper within an hour and restored computers after 36 hours.
Magellan's LeadCare devices, used for more than half of US blood lead tests 2013-2017, gave falsely low results on venous samples; the company delayed telling FDA for 21 months.
Storm surge flooded basements holding fuel tanks and pumps at two Manhattan hospitals whose generators sat on upper floors. Both hospitals evacuated.
A patient on a cardiac monitor died after the monitor's crisis alarm had been left off; lower-level alarms sounded at the nurses' station but went unheeded.
A 60-year-old ICU patient's monitor alarmed for rising heart rate and falling oxygen saturation; staff responded only after about an hour, when he had stopped breathing.
Non-clinical analogue. Iced pitot probes caused inconsistent airspeeds, the autopilot disconnected, and the crew did not recognise or recover from a stall.
After city power failed, Memorial ran on generators that failed as floodwater rose. 45 bodies were later recovered from the hospital.
During the 2003 blackout multiple NYC hospital emergency generators failed. The outage was associated with about 90 excess deaths citywide.
A network loop took down clinical applications at an academic medical centre for about four days, forcing a return to paper it had abandoned years earlier.
Information only, not advice. FailSystems is an aggregation and synthesis of published sources. It is not consulting, engineering, legal, regulatory or medical advice, and using it creates no professional relationship. Health systems are complex and no approach fits every organisation: anything you adopt is your own decision, at your own risk, and should be checked against the current official sources and by qualified people who know your setting. Full disclaimer.