Home Forums Discussions Problems Electronic Prescribing Outage 8/18

Hello All,
Shortly after 3PM EDT Amazing Charts was informed that Newcrop our e-prescribing vendor was having "Intermediate Issues" with some of their servers. It appears these issues were hardware related which may lead to extended downtime. I will update this thread once service is restored to 100%.

Clayton@AC

Thanks for the update.

In their absence, the auto med interaction check is giving the computer fits. I turned it off with the button on the upper right corner from the e-prescribing page. When I clicked on e-scipt status, it crashed AC. Is all this normal for an outage of NewCrop?

A failure of eRx often renders the entire prescription window slow or frozen, at least for me. Here is our last eRx outage. There were comments about problems printing prescriptions.

NewCrop has been a liability for AC users for years IMHO.

At 8AM EDT this morning we received word that electronic prescribing should have been back up and running. I am still awaiting confirmation as the the exact cause of the outage. It was speculated earlier yesterday that the culprit was a faulty raid controller which took 16 server drives down. Regarding redundancy, Newcrop has stated the following:

"We have been working on full fail-over capability that would have eliminated the problem, but it was not ready to go. Our data flows have increased rapidly and an additional load-balancing layer is needed to support the new configuration. It is about to be installed, but was not ready in time to assist today."

I will update if I hear back as to the exact cause of the outage.

Thanks,

Clayton@AC

So are you saying the last time this occurred was 12/2013? If so, that's pretty good. How often does this occur.

Also, NewCrop back in December 2013 stated that they always inform AC of the issue, and finally AC posted this info immediately unlike before.

I think banks rely on servers and networks far more than we do. We can change to fax or paper and wait out the downtime. Banks cannot.

Now, I can't speak for anyone else, but our eRx worked find unless we tried to eRx.

Does anyone have the statistics of how often eRx has gone down?

How would you tell? My patients complain that their eRx isn't there at the store several times a week. There is no actual confirmation of the pharmacy receiving the eRx, so does the failure occur in my office, NewCrop, Surescripts or the pharmacy? The national eRx system is as unverifiable as the average email message.

After a few minutes, on the main screen at the top there is an "e-prescribing" menu. Go there and check "Prescriptiion Status". It should say pending, verified or failed. Granted, if it fails it really should send an alert to the physician's mailbox, but it does not. But if you remember you can check it in the status window.

Thanks Wayne. I used to do this very frequently at first, to try to see if it was my problem or the pharmacy's when the eRx didn't get there. Unfortunately, it only verifies one level deep, the NewCrop level. How reliable their reporting system is, no way to tell.

Thanks John. What I mean is a given outage, not script by script. I happen to be lucky so it's hard for me to comment, but our eRx has gone down maybe four times. I can't worry about the one that AC says made it, but the pharmacy said it didn't. That is something likely on their end or pharmacies being pharmacies.

I guess when I try to send an eRx and it times out two or three times, I wait a couple of hours or to the next day.

Oh, John, lol. My patients never tell me the script isn't there. They tell me, I didn't send the script. There's a difference and I almost don't want to re-send it. The pharmacies simply tell them your doctor didn't send it.

Well, OK Mr. Pharmacy person. Don't tell them, call me. I really don't like pharmacies.

Hi Ryanjo,
If the status displayed on the status screen states "Verified" that means that the script has reached the pharmacy and the pharmacy has sent a verification of receipt. If the status states successful that means that it at least made it to Newcrop. Successful is the status likely displayed for faxed scripts. If you receive reports from the pharmacy of not receiving a particular eRx script, and you see verified in the status screen, we can open a case for Surescripts to investigate.

Clayton@AC