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.

"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.

Source: http://www.information-age.com/channels/security-and-continuity/news/1289658/data-centre-outage-disrupts-central-healthcare-system.thtml