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INDIANAPOLIS – The state computer systems supporting key Medicaid, welfare and child support services in Indiana failed Monday night and still weren’t fully operable by Wednesday evening.
The Indiana Office of Technology brought the Family and Social Services Administration back online Wednesday afternoon and hoped to return the Department of Child Services to normal operation today.
Gerry Weaver, chief information officer for the Office of Technology, said child-support payments should go out as usual Friday, saying that the agency no longer issues checks and instead uses electronic debit cards.
A message left at the Department of Child Services was not immediately returned Wednesday evening.
Lauren Auld, spokeswoman for FSSA, said the problem affected the eligibility system for the Healthy Indiana insurance plan and Medicaid, welfare and food stamps programs.
During the failure, case-file information was not available and some meetings and interviews will have to be rescheduled, Auld said, but no one will lose benefits.
Weaver explained that the state this year set up a disaster recovery capability so that if a tornado or other catastrophe hit the state Capitol all data would not be lost. Critical state systems now copy the data to Indiana University in Bloomington as a backup.
But Monday night, the communication link between the state system and the IU backup failed. And when it was brought back online it did not come up correctly and resulted in the corruption of some of the databases.
“There was no way to recover quickly,” Weaver said. “We’ve been working around the clock to regain all the data so things can continue functioning correctly.”
Weaver said the problem was ultimately a hardware failure but didn’t know who was responsible because all efforts were focused on getting the systems operable again.
“We will make sure it cannot happen again,” he said.
nkelly@jg.net
