Practice Fusion EHR Caught In Internet Brown-Out

10 Health Apps That Might Make You Sick

A number of small physician practices and clinics sent home patients and staff after cloud-based electronic health record provider Practice Fusion's site was part of a global two-day outage.

On Thursday, Practice Fusion wrote on its Facebook page that its datacenter partner had completed the upgrades necessary "to address widespread global connectivity network access problems that impacted Practice Fusion over the last 48 hours." About 35% of customers were affected on Tuesday; Practice Fusion did not disclose Wednesday's outage statistics to InformationWeek. The company took its EHR offline on Wednesday night to allow the upgrade and network resilience testing, and then turned the free EHR software back on today, it said. A Thursday afternoon check of IsItDownRightNow confirmed Practice Fusion's site was operational.

"Practice Fusion is one of several companies impacted by the global Internet brown-out, which started Tuesday," a Practice Fusion spokeswoman said in an email interview. "As a result of this brown-out, a subset of our customers had intermittent access to the EHR on Tuesday and Wednesday of this week. The recent connectivity issue that affected Practice Fusion's EHR has been addressed. That said, we believe the larger Internet brown-out issues recently reported have not been fully felt nor resolved. We are monitoring the situation closely with our data center partner to address any other issues that may arise."

[Big players are moving to take advantage of Apple's EHR integration software. Read Apple HealthKit Details Emerge.]

The developer blamed a global network brownout, citing news reports that the Internet is near or beyond 512,000 Internet routes. The servers that send Internet data across networks carry these routes, but older routers from various vendors won't add more routes without tweaks, Fox Business News said. To resolve this problem, engineers must increase the router's memory cap and reboot the device, Fox wrote. But unless IT professionals complete this manual process, routers left online can become overloaded and slow down Internet access times for users everywhere, the article said.

Those larger issues also apparently affected sites such as hosting provider LiquidWeb, which also blamed 512K for its downtime on Tuesday, Ars Technica reported. In addition, eBay, Comcast, and Time-Warner had outages, the article said. Cloud-based outages are comparatively rare, and the benefits outweigh these instances, said Rafi Sweary, president of WalkMe, via email.

"Service interruptions existed long before the cloud did, and even predated computers and the Internet in general. Periodic interruptions, caused by a diverse range of factors, have always impacted services from electricity to mail, and beyond," he said. "The Internet age before cloud computing actually had more technical problems than now. So we don't see this rare interruption affecting cloud adoption."

Medical offices accustomed to running their operations on Practice Fusion quickly turned to social media and other websites to voice both concerns and support.

Because the practice was unable to access its EHR, one Texas provider sent employees home, the office manager posted online. A New York pediatric office could not see any files on Wednesday, including the schedule, another healthcare professional said.  

Some complained about support and communication.

Practice Fusion "customer service is terrible now. Took them over seven hours to say they were having issues. We have been offline all day long. Terrible and no reason for it," wrote William Kniss on Facebook.

Added Jamie Little via Twitter: "I am not patient! Every other website works fine. The fault is with you, not the Internet. Get with it! You are hurting patient outcomes!"

It appeared an almost equal number of socially active customers voiced support for the developer of free EHR software and offered recommendations for improving the service and users' access to off-line data.

"Computer problems can happen to anyone, even if we used our own servers in our offices... I do not blame Practice Fusion for that. However, we would always have multiple redundant back ups of the data so if anything happened to our office we could set up shop elsewhere and be ok in a day or [two]," said Al Musella on Practice Fusion's Facebook page. 

Any EHR product, cloud-based or on site, can encounter problems, said Michelle Hellwig on Facebook: "I've been with them for 3 1/2 years and had a total of four hours of unplanned down time. How many other EHRs, free or expensive, can say that?"

Practice Fusion not only provided updates, but also gave customers suggested workarounds, said WalkMe's Sweary.

"In this specific case it is also should be noted that Practice Fusion responded extremely well, providing their customers with clear and consistent updates over the last few days, including information about alternative ways for users to connect to their EHRs, as well as updates about maintenance to their data center, and when their systems would be running again," he said. "From our experience, Practice Fusion provides an exemplary online experience for their customers, and they did that here."

Cloud Connect (Sept. 29 to Oct. 2, 2014) brings its "cloud-as–business–enabler" programming to Interop New York for the first time in 2014. The two-day Cloud Connect Summit will give Interop attendees an intensive immersion in how to leverage the cloud to drive innovation and growth for their business. In addition to the Summit, Interop will feature five cloud workshops programmed by Cloud Connect. The Interop Expo will also feature a Cloud Connect Zone showcasing cloud companies' technology solutions. Register with Discount Code MPIWK or $200 off Total Access or Cloud Connect Summit Passes.