Cerner Millennium EPR issue now resolved following national outage

Downtime and performance issues with Cerner’s Millennium electronic patient record (EPR), which caused a national outage, have now been fully resolved.

NHS trusts across the country declared incidents on 11 October 2022 after their EPR systems went down, with reports of slow performance and crashing. A number of larger London trusts resorted to downtime processes.

Through investigations performed from teams at Cerner and NHS Digital, the cause was found to not be a Cerner Millennium issue.

The issue was related to a defective server within NHS services which was isolated once the teams found evidence that there were significant queues against that.

Digital Health News understands the issue was linked to NHS Digital’s Smartcard software.

Once it was identified, isolated and restarted, services were resumed. By 7.30am on October 12, trusts were back off downtime processes and resorted to normal process.

An NHS Digital spokesperson said: “The issue affecting some trusts using Cerner’s Millennium electronic patient records platform has now been resolved.

“The issue related to the interaction between an NHS Digital server and the Millennium platform. We are working with Oracle Cerner to carry out a review of the incident.”

It is the first significant issue since Cerner was acquired by global electronic health record (EHR) provider Oracle last December, in a deal worth around £22.4billion.

Digital Health News approached Oracle Cerner for comment.