Cerner Corp., a leading supplier of Electronic Health Records software, experienced a major computer outage on July 23rd which affected an unspecified number of hospitals. The five-hour outage was blamed on “human error.”
While affected hospitals and healthcare providers were not immediately aware of any patients being harmed as a result of the disruption, they expressed serious concerns about the duration of the outage, and the fact that no Cerner backup system took over to keep their EHRs running. The Kansas City, MO-based company stated that its clients “all have downtime procedures in place to ensure patient safety,” but conceded that it may implement additional measures to avoid lengthy outages in the future. Physicians and nurses had to write their notes and orders by hand, and many had no access to previous patient information because they were using remote hosting from Cerner.
Whether utilizing cloud-based computing or a local server, uninterrupted access to your data is critical and downtime must be kept to an absolute minimum. Please contact Microwize Technology for more information on your options.