Data centre outage disrupts central healthcare system
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Hundreds of doctors suffer intermittent access to centralised healthcare IT system following data centre downtime
A centralised healthcare system that provides doctor's practices in the UK with access to patient records was disrupted this week following a data centre outage.
Healthcare IT provider EMIS's hosted system provides GPs and other staff with a central database of medical records, appointments and prescription details. According to EMIS, approximately 200 UK practices were affected "for a number of hours" after technical problems occured at the provider's data centre.
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"We had an outage in our data centre on the morning of Wednesday 6 October 2010 for a number of hours," Sean Riddell, CEO of EMIS, said in a statement emailed to Information Age. "This unfortunately affected around 200 EMIS practices using our PCS hosted system - out of a total of 5,500 EMIS practices using all our systems - in certain areas of the country. A significant number of affected practice systems were restored by around 1pm on the same day, the remainder by 3pm that day."
“This was an extremely rare incident for EMIS. I would like to apologise to all the practices affected and reassure them that everything was done to rectify it as quickly as possible," he added.
