Over the past six weeks, system outages have been reported at a number of public hospitals and healthcare facilities affiliated with National Healthcare Group and National University Health System, leading to appointment delays and longer wait times. .
The first reported blackout occurred on August 27; 26 IT applications, including EMR, appointment systems, pharmaceuticals and laboratories, were cut at 17 government-run medical facilities.
The second, longer outage occurred on September 5, affecting eight community healthcare facilities and two groups of general clinics.
Three weeks later on September 29, another systematic error was reported at several NHG and NUHS facilities, including Woodlands Polyclinic and Yishun Polyclinic, according to a news release by CNAS.
WHY IT IMPORTANT
The NHG Center Cluster and the Western NUHS Cluster serve a total population of approximately two million people. The system failure has caused “significant operational effects,” Senior Health Minister Janil Puthucheary said in a response to a recent parliamentary inquiry.
He explained: “Patients have to wait longer, possibly up to an hour at affected facilities. Some have had to reschedule their outpatient appointments. There were delays in dispensing medications. for the patient,” he explained.
“Fortunately, there are no compromises for urgent care services between facilities during IT disruptions. No one is denied emergency departments, or denied urgent care,” he added.
BIGGER BACKGROUND
The previous two incidents were attributed to errors found in hardware devices in the data center.
According to Dr. Puthucheary, in the days leading up to the first outage, two nodes in the firewall zones of the data centers failed due to a bug in the firmware. The manufacturer, CISCO, was then contacted to determine the fault and patch the devices.
However, the two nodes failed again a week later causing a second IT outage. One review showed that the failure was different from the first event.
In all cases, NHG and NUHS activated business continuity measures and downtime processes, and in some cases resorted to manual documentation, following system failures.
“Fix fixes for some issues are available and have been rolled out. For others, we continue to work with the manufacturer,” said the senior State Minister.
In the meantime, we’ve ramped up capacity in the network to have more active buffers to increase resilience, he added.
Furthermore, Dr. Puthucheary does not attribute the first two system outages to a lack of manpower.
He also assured parliament that there was no indication of a security breach of the affected systems.
The Integrated Health Information System (iHIS), which implements, maintains and manages the IT systems of all public healthcare facilities and institutes in Singapore, has yet to provide details on the times. The third and recent system outage was resolved within the same day.
“System services have been restored as of 1pm. We are monitoring the situation to assist our healthcare partners in serving their patients,” the health technology agency said. know in a Facebook post on September 29.
