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Oracle’s Federal Electronic Health Record experienced a nation-wide outage on Tuesday, the Department of Veterans Affairs confirmed to CNBC.
The agency said “all users” of the corporate’s Federal EHR, including the VA, the Department of Defense, the U.S. Coast Guard and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, were impacted. Six VA medical centers, 26 community clinics, and distant VA sites experienced disruptions, the agency said.
“Affected VA medical facilities followed standard contingency procedures throughout the outage to make sure continuity of take care of Veterans,” a VA spokesperson said in an announcement Thursday.
An electronic health record, or an EHR, is a digital version of a patient’s medical history that is updated by doctors and nurses. It’s crucial software inside the U.S. health-care system, and outages may cause serious disruptions to patient care.
Oracle is one among the most important EHR vendors due to it’s $28 billion acquisition of the medical records giant Cerner in 2022.Â
The corporate’s Federal EHR initially began experiencing issues at around 8:37 a.m. Eastern on Tuesday, the VA said. Users reported that the software froze and so they were unable to access applications. Access was restored and cleared by 2:05 p.m. Eastern that day after Oracle restarted the system.
Oracle is carrying out an investigation to find out what caused the outage, the VA said. Oracle didn’t immediately reply to CNBC’s request for comment.
The outage marks Oracle’s latest stumble in a thorny, years-long EHR rollout with the VA, which has been marred by patient safety concerns. The agency launched a strategic review of Cerner in 2021, before Oracle’s acquisition, and it temporarily paused deployment of the software in 2023.
4 VA facilities in Michigan are slated to deploy Oracle’s Federal EHR in 2026.
In October, Oracle unveiled a brand-new EHR equipped with fresh cloud and artificial intelligence capabilities. The early adopter program for the software begins this yr, though it is not clear if the VA has plans to put it to use.
Oracle is slated to report third-quarter fiscal 2025 earnings on Monday.
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