The US Veterans Affairs Department has once gain suffered a regional outage of its Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA), a VA official has confirmed. This latest incidence, the result of hardware problems at its Denver datacenter, affected 12 medical centers from Colorado to California in mid-April.
In August 2007, the VistA system went down for nine hours preventing physicians at 17 medical facilities from accessing the electronic medical record system.
VA is in the process of moving health systems from local hospitals to regional datacenters, a consolidation program VA officials hope will improve information security and help the department apply consistent and standardized management practices for critical information systems.
Under the regional program, information systems are physically secured in the datacenters, and information technology employees operate, manage and maintain the systems remotely.