Modern Healthcare’s Joseph Conn has an article on a large 8 hour VistA outage at the Sacramento VA facility that occurred on August 31st, 2007. Some believe that a VA security reorganization centralizing control at the expense of reliability has gone too far: “Davoren said there has been a welcome consciousness-raising within the VA about privacy and security issues, but heightened security measures also have had drawbacks, including difficulty scheduling teleconferences and other snafus. �For example, to fully comply with security requirements on our examination-room PCs, we must log out of both a clinical application such as our Computerized Patient Record System and the Microsoft Windows operating system each time we leave the room even for a moment, yet it may take as long as 12 minutes to log back on when we return. Given a 20- or 30-minute visit with their veteran patient, the clinician is thus forced to choose to �do the right thing� for either the patient or the system, but cannot do both, �the bad news is that centralization of physical IT resources to the (regional approach) has directly led to more system downtime for individual medical centers than they have ever had before, resulting in hundreds of simultaneous threats to the safety of our veteran patients.�