NEW YORK (AP) _ A database that is supposed to help New York doctors spot prescription drug abusers is back in operation after it was knocked offline for four days due to a computer hardware problem.

The outage frustrated some doctors, who use the system to check whether patients seeking pain pills like OxyContin have already gotten prescriptions from other physicians.

State Health Department spokesman Peter Constantakes tells Newsday that the problem has been corrected. He couldn’t say how often outages occur. The system was offline between Monday and Friday morning.

State lawmakers last spring voted to establish a more comprehensive system to track potentially addictive drugs to replace the current one, which is limited and sometimes has outdated information. It is supposed to be up and running by August.

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