Hawaii's state prison EHR hasn't been properly functioning for several months, leaving providers unable to access inmate medical and vaccination records, Honolulu Civil Beat reported.
"The fact that EMR has been down for over six months is unacceptable," Christin Johnson, coordinator for the Hawaii Correctional Systems Oversight Commission, told the commission, according to the Dec. 16 story, describing the outage as an "absolute crisis."
"Patient safety and health is at risk without a functioning EMR," she added.
A Hawaii Department of Public Safety spokeswoman told the news outlet the process to purchase a new EHR started in 2021 but is still in procurement. The deadline for installing the new system is 2025.
"Unfortunately, the current system failed before the procurement process could be completed," the spokesperson said. The agency is working with its EHR vendor to move the data to a new server or the cloud, the spokesperson added.
The department's EHR vendor is eClinicalWorks, according to a Civil Beat story from August. An eClinicalWorks spokesperson told Becker's the prison system's on-premise server is down. "This is really not a software issue. Rather, it's a hardware issue," the spokesperson said.