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Anatomy of the VA's IT Meltdown
Lucas123 writes "According to a Computerworld story, a relatively simple breakdown in communications led to a day-long systems outage within the VA's medical centers. The ultimate result of the outage: the cancellation of a project to centralize IT systems at more than 150 medical facilities into four regional data processing centers. The shutdown 'left months of work to recover data to update the medical records of thousands of veterans. The procedural failure also exposed a common problem in IT transformation efforts: Fault lines appear when management reporting shifts from local to regional.'"
DOH! Looks like it was all just due to someone's assumption that someone else would do their job.
DOH! Looks like someone was making assumptions without reading the article. They considered switching to the backup, but since they didn't know whether the problem was on their end or the server's end, they were afraid that switching to the backup data center would destroy that one as well.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
I can follow up a bit on this, since I worked for the DVA for a few years in the early 90s. Even then, just about all records were online and searchable. A veteran that went from Albany, NY to Tampa, FL and got sick could get his records transferred overnight (electronically) between the two hospitals, and there were ways to get metadata about the veteran immediately, including recent visits at any location and reason for the visit. I imagine that improvements in networks mean that these records can be viewed immediately.
At the time, there seemed to be a lot of waste (think $10,000 CD burner in 1993ish, optical cards with images and data impressed on them, etc). But they really were trying to be ahead of the game - a friend of mine showed me his green card and it was almost identical to a design I was working with when I was at the DVA. They also had mechanisms for charging back to private insurance companies in the event a veteran was only partially covered for a visit.
Oh, and just about all the software that was written and in use by those hospitals are in the public domain and downloadable for free - many other hospitals use VistA as their base.