EHR outage takes down federal Cerner systems

An electronic health records outage affected federal sites including the Department of Defense, Coast Guard, and Veterans Affairs, resulting in nearly three hours of downtime during which clinicians could not update medical information. The outage was caused by a failure of one of three Oracle database instances. Although no evidence of patient harm was found, more than 95,000 clinician users were affected by the outage. The systems were restored and back online by 8 p.m. There has been ongoing concern and investigation over the reliability of the Cerner electronic health record system.