We don't yet know what happened. If both Southwest and American Airlines, with huge IT staffs, can have catastrophic system crashes, I guess we can't be too surprised when it happens to smaller shops. I would like to think they will learn the cause, take preventative measures, and possibly evaluate evaluate ways (redundant server, hot spare with data migration plan, or whatever) to get service restored faster. It could happen again!
The lack of communications regarding system status has been an issue for a while. The eRx and drug interaction systems have both crashed multiple times, with no notification sent out. I don't think any of us will be picky about what method of communication is chosen ... just choose one, and tell us. With ACPM and AC in the cloud, there are now four systems off in the cloud that can have problems. We shouldn't have to guess what the status is.
We are (maybe were) considering AC in the cloud. I will need to hear how the chance of this type of outage will be minimized, plans for a quick restore if it happens, and some sort of way to access pt data if it goes down before we decide to move forward.
