VA finds bug that caused mix-up in health exchange system

The Veterans Affairs Department discovered on Tuesday the software bugs that led to instances of doctors receiving the wrong patient data when they accessed electronic medical information shared with the Defense Department.

The glitches first surfaced in March, when a VA doctor checked the Defense's AHLTA electronic health record system for prescription data on a female patient. That record showed a Defense physician had prescribed her an erectile dysfunction drug, leading the VA doctor to suspect the system had mixed up patient information. VA issued a safety alert about the problem on March 3.

"The VA clinician may see the patient's data during one session, but another session may not display the data previously seen," the alert noted. "This problem occurs intermittently and has been reported when querying DoD laboratory, pharmacy and radiology reports."

VA clinicians also reported an intermittent bug in the Bidirectional Health Information Exchange with Defense, which allows the two departments to exchange medical data. In that instance, search results occasionally would return incomplete records when a clinician made a patient inquiry on AHLTA.

VA first tried to replicate the bugs in a test system, but IT officials couldn't create the same problems. They decided to take all VA users offline. On Tuesday, they managed to reproduce and identify the errors.

The bugs resulted from switching from a single processor to a multiprocessor computer to manage the bidirectional system, said Roger Baker, chief information officer at VA. The department is working to resolve the problem so the system can run on the multiprocessor system. He expects the fix to be installed sometime next month.

Until then, VA and Defense clinicians will fax and e-mail patient data to one another. VA made several hundred thousand queries a month using the bidirectional system to access AHLTA, but Baker said he doubted VA faxed information on that many patients while the system was down.