Kansas health department says data restored, but delays expected in retrieving vital stats

Kansas health dept. says computer problems solved

TOPEKA, Kan. — Kansas residents still may have to wait up to four weeks to get copies of birth certificates and other records, but the state Department of Health and Environment said Thursday that it has resolved recent computer problems.

Secretary Rod Bremby said the department has restored its electronic data, including 20 million copies of birth, death and marriage certificates and other vital statistics records. But its vital statistics records system is still being tested and won’t be back online until at least Monday.

Meanwhile, Bremby said, the department faces a backlog of 8,000 requests for records from its vital statistics office and plans to temporarily double the staff processing them. He also said the department’s private computer vendor has agreed to eat more than $750,000 in costs associated with resolving the problems.

The hardware for the department’s electronic records storage crashed Aug. 5, taking down 85 percent of its servers and cutting off access to electronic records. The problems came as some parents were seeking copies of birth certificates needed to enroll children in school.

The department has prided itself on handling records requests relatively quickly, often the same day for someone seeking a copy of a birth certificate in person at the agency’s Topeka offices.

Jenni Stauffer came from Auburn, outside Topeka, to get a copy of the birth certificate for her 6-week-old son, Deacon, so they can fly to California next week to visit family. She left the vital statistics office without a copy, wondering whether the airline will instead accept a letter from the hospital in which he was born.

“It being the only place in the state to get it, they could have a backup,” she said, acknowledging she “told off” office workers.

The department has trucked in 120,000 paper copies of records from storage in salt mines near Hutchinson, in south-central Kansas, but many were birth certificates and related documents for children aged 4 through 6, who’d potentially be entering school.

State Health Director Dr. Jason Eberhart-Phillips said some Kansans may need copies of their birth certificates for loan applications or to obtain benefits from the state or federal government, meaning delays could create some hardships.

“The need for this document is turning up in everybody’s lives,” Eberhart-Phillips said after Bremby had a news conference. “The social cost of this is heartbreaking.”

Bremby said about 50 employees from other parts of the department will be diverted to processing requests for vital statistics records, starting Monday.

“We’ll try to mow through that backlog as quickly as we can,” Bremby said. “We think this is the highest priority within the agency now, and we’re reassigning staff to make sure that we address these concerns.”

Both Bremby and the department’s vendor, Xiotech Corp., based in Eden Prairie, Minn., described the crash as unprecedented, something unlikely to reoccur now that the storage hardware has been replaced.

Department officials have emphasized that it didn’t lose any data, despite the crash. Bremby said the department has a new backup storage device for its vital statistics records, so reloading them into its computers would go more quickly in the future.

“We don’t anticipate this ever happening again, though,” he said.

Brian Reagan, the company’s chief marketing officer, said the department’s problems started with a disk-drive failure. He said the company is still compiling a detailed analysis.

“We do understand, as Rod mentioned, that a series of events that cascaded, one after the other, really resulted in this downtime that we’re very, deeply sorry for,” Reagan said. “We have found a faulty disk drive, essentially, within our system that caused this downtime event.”

Replacing the storage hardware normally would have cost the department about $685,000, and Bremby said it expects to incur about $71,000 in additional costs, including overtime and document shipping.

“We had no push-back there,” Bremby said of Xiotech assuming those costs. “So, the fact that they stepped up and did the right thing is something that I think we’re deeply grateful for.”

Online:

Kansas Department of Health and Environment: www.kdheks.gov/

Xiotech Corp.: www.xiotech.com/