The Department of Veterans Affairs had a significant outage within Cerner’s electronic health records system on Thursday, due to a corrupted patient database that could have caused major harm to VA patients due to the errors.
It is the latest problem to hit the VA’s troubled electronic health records modernization program, which has provoked ire from lawmakers and VA frontline medical staff…
VA spokesperson Terrence Hayes said: ““VA experienced a system outage of its electronic health Record system on August 4, 2022, which also affected VA, Department of Defense and U.S. Coast Guard sites using the Oracle-Cerner EHR. At 12:07 p.m. EDT, Oracle-Cerner received monitoring alerts indicating an issue with one of its databases. The system was taken offline to execute recovery of the database, during which time the sites switched to standard downtime procedures.
He added: “During downtime of the EHR, medical personnel could still care for patients, but documentation occurred on paper. The system was fully restored for all end-users at 4:23 p.m. EDT, for a total downtime of 4 hours and 16 minutes. No data corruption or data loss occurred.” … Read the full article here.
