Cerner data outage causes providers to lose access to EHRs

A data outage at Cerner during the week of July 23 caused an undisclosed number of hospitals and providers to lose access to remotely hosted EHR information, forcing them to revert back to pen and paper.

“Cerner’s remote-hosted clients experienced unscheduled downtime last week,” Kelli Christman, a spokeswoman for the Kansas City, Mo.-based health IT vendor, told CMIO in a written statement. “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 document work instructions for any improvements that can be made.”

Doctors and hospitals interviewed by the Los Angeles Times for an Aug. 3 article weren’t immediately aware of any patients harmed by the outage, but it did force multiple healthcare organizations to revert to paper without access to electronic patient information.

An Adventist Health spokeswoman told the newspaper that the Roseville, Calif.-based organization was forced to access historical information using alternate data sources, such as the hospital lab and pharmacy.

Mistakes could have been made, Brent Haberman, MD, told the Los Angeles Times. The pediatric pulmonologist was affected by a data outage lasting several hours at LeBonheur Children’s Hospital and St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn. “If you can't get to all the patient notes and all the previous data, you can imagine it's very confusing and mistakes could be made. A new doctor comes on shift and doesn’t have access to what happened the past few hours or days.”