VA Cerner Electronic Health Records (EHR) system went down for four hours mainly due to a patient database corruption issue according to a report from FedScoop.
Cerner Electronic Medical Records (EMR) Software outage was experienced on Thursday the 4th of August, affecting users across the Department of Defense (DoD) and the Coast Guard. The outage began at 12:07 pm which caused time lags to VA patient databases meanwhile the corrupt database was fixed and reprogrammed.
The software system outage
Automatic monitoring alerts were received by Oracle Cerner reflecting an issue with one of its patient databases. After which the system was put offline to implement recovery of the database. During this time switched to standard downtime processes.
What is a system outage?
According to VA and Cerner, a system outage is an unscheduled system event in which the complete EHR software solution becomes unavailable and downtime procedures are implemented.
What happened during the downtime of the Cerner EMR Software?
During the downtime of the electronic health records system, healthcare providers were still able to care for their patients, however, documentation took place on paper. The system was completely restored after 4 hours and 16 minutes with no data corruption or data loss in the end.
Clinical staff members could not check in, discharge, or transfer patients. While patients were not registered or transferred to another unit within the EHR software, patients could be viewed and treated. Once the issue was fixed patients were transferred within the system to the proper patient unit.
The patient data which was corrupted could have caused patient damage due to the errors. A corrupt database meant that something was programmed incorrectly. If the issue wasn’t corrected on time by Oracle Cerner then one patient’s file could point to a different patient data. To ensure such an incident doesn’t take place there should be a plan to solve training and referral issues.
