How safe is the cloud? The good news is that like any of the other outages it was restored and some hospitals reported they were not able to chart the entire day. With complexities today and data platforms, 
we are almost all learning to live with it, but with healthcare it’s critical. Obviously it sounds like a failover to another data center was not in the picture either as that is normally what happens when one goes down, the other takes over and there’s no interruption of service. I do want to hear what the “human error” was here when it comes out. There are other glitches around to, but maybe not as critical such as this one, which delayed attesting for stimulus money for some with GE which related back to a SAP software issue. What is the back up plan in most cases, grab the pencil and paper until the system is live again.
GE Centricity EHRs Need To Fix Their Algorithms (Math)-Some Customers May Not Be Able to Attest Until The End of November After the Software Update
One other healthcare issue was when the AWS Cloud server went down in 2011 and a patient monitoring system was hit and I think we all remember those 3 days whether one works in healthcare or not. BD
What Happens When The Cloud Server Goes Down When Monitoring Patient ECGs At Home With No Fail Over - Disturbing Thread From Amazon Web Services Forum
Cerner Corp.'s remote hosting service went down for several hours on Monday, July 23, affecting Cerner's hospital and physician practice clients all over the country. This unusual outage, which reportedly took down the vendor's entire network, raises some new questions about the reliability of cloud-based hosting services.
Responding to an inquiry from InformationWeek Healthcare, Cerner spokesperson Kelli Christman said, "Cerner’s remote-hosted clients experienced unscheduled downtime this week. Our clients all have downtime procedures in place to ensure patient safety. The issue has been resolved and clients are back up and running. A human error caused the outage. As a result, we are reviewing our training protocol and documented work instructions for any improvements that can be made."
http://www.informationweek.com/news/healthcare/EMR/240004446?cid=InformationWeek-Twitter
Cerner is just as terrible here in the UK. Expect a few outages in a month for a few hours. This is for a large NHS trust in North Bristol which has paid Cerner GBP 30 million. Feel sorry for every single Cerner customer.
ReplyDelete