A system failure of the Comprehensive Hospital Information System used in the northern Malaysian state of Kedah forced clinicians to work manually for at least a day.
On Aug 11, tHIS went down due to a glitch in one of its application servers, disrupting services to public hospitals and health facilities across the state, including the 500-bed Sultan Abdul Halim General Hospital, Sungai Petani public health clinic and a nursing training academy.
WHY PROBLEM
System failures often occur during rush hours when traffic is heavy.
However, the downtime lasted longer than 24 hours and According to local news, there are an estimated 3,000 patients at Sultan Abdul Halim Hospital.
The tHIS incident significantly impacted patient registration and access to medical records, requiring doctors to handwrite referrals and nurses to confirm their prescriptions with each patient.
This problem also causes backlogs and delays in treatment, although the extent is yet to be confirmed.
The Kedah state health department has activated its business continuity plan to mitigate the impact of the system failure, director Dr Ismuni Bohar said in a statement the following day.
“Remedial actions and monitoring of system access performance are currently being implemented to ensure this issue is fully resolved,” said Dr. Bohari. “The department will also continue to monitor developments and ensure that HIS recovery and restoration operations proceed smoothly so that patient care services are not impacted.”
No details were provided on when the system would be fully restored.
A plan to migrate the tHIS system to the cloud server was put in place following this major IT incident.
“As part of long-term initiatives, the Ministry of Health and the Kedah State Health Department plan to upgrade the existing system [tHIS] system to the cloud to prevent a similar incident from happening again,” Dr. Bohari shared.
THE BIGGER CONTEXT
In Malaysia, at least one in ten public hospitals use HIS. Of these, 10 general hospitals are known to have adopted digital tHIS while the rest are using a hybrid or manual system. tHIS integrates clinical, administrative and financial systems into a single paperless system. The system was first deployed at the 960-bed Selayang Hospital in Selangor.
The adoption of HIS in Malaysian hospitals has been slow due to factors such as limited or lack of technical knowledge, lack of funding, and interoperability challenges.
A similar system for the dental industry was also recently reported to have encountered numerous operational challenges, including frequent system failures during peak hours. The telehealth primary care dental health clinical information system, which has been used in more than 100 clinics nationwide for more than two decades, also has a slow interface, which is said to contribute to inaccurate and outdated patient records.
