Hospitals in Auckland and Northland were impacted by the outage. (File photo)
Photo: 123rf.com
There are calls from the senior doctors’ union for an explanation from Health New Zealand as to what caused the most recent IT outage to hospitals in the upper North Island.
And the head of Health New Zealand’s digital services admits improvements are needed.
The latest computer systems outage happened over a 12-hour period between Wednesday night to Thursday morning.
Health NZ executive director for the northern region Andrew Brant confirmed the outage had affected several hospitals.
“Health NZ hospitals in Te Tai Tokerau, Waitematā, Auckland and Counties Manukau experienced an IT outage yesterday impacting some clinical and operational systems,” he said.
“The outage lasted around 12 hours with services restored to all impacted hospitals in the early hours of this morning.”
He said patient care continued safely during those hours.
“We are currently completing an incident debrief to identify any potential opportunities to improve our systems,” he said.
It comes less than a month after online portal Manage My Health was hacked and patient data held ransom.
Association of Salaried Medical Specialists (ASMS) executive director Sarah Dalton said an outage had happened more than once recently and staff and the public deserved answers.
“We haven’t had any kind of a meaningful response from Heath New Zealand’s leadership and given the frequency of these system failures, I think the public deserves to know what’s going on in our public health system.”
Dalton said it was chaos for many staff during the outage period.
“Clinicians were unable to print patient labels, access laboratory records which means no bloods, they couldn’t book theatres, they couldn’t see patient histories online.
“Basically anything that might be recorded digitally, was unable to be accessed.”
Dalton put the outage down to the lack of resources and investment into the systems by the government.
“There is no meaningful investment and the kind of work that is needed to bring it up to scratch and to deal with issues of interoperability between community based care, hospital based care and across the country, they are just not in a place to make those things happen,” she said.
But Health New Zealand acting chief information technology officer Darren Douglass said there was no link between the IT outages in recent weeks and staffing numbers in the Digital Services team.
“All but one of the outages this month have been due to third party vendor issues.
“We operate a very complex technology environment, and we have monitoring and support in place across the system.
“We do experience technical issues from time to time. This includes the recent IT outages where thanks to strong back-up plans, patient care continued safely.
“Since we became a single health organisation, we have been working hard to rationalise and modernise our systems, improve the quality of our data and digital platforms and ensure that they connect across the country to support and enhance healthcare delivery,” he said.
Auckland University computer scientist Dr Ulrich Speidel said the country’s systems needed a complete overhaul.
He said the systems were vulnerable due to decades of neglect.
“That dates back even to the district health boards, back then every district health board was cost under pressure, so you know, where do you go when you’re not having to save on doctors and nurses, you go and see what you can save in the IT and your trying to make your old equipment tick over,” he said.
Speaking to Morning Report on Friday, Douglass said Health NZ had a 10-year digital investment plan to modernise current systems, and while he considered the present setup as reliable and broadly stable, more work needed to be done.
“My message would be that we need to do better, our clinical staff and frontline staff should expect better than they’re getting, and we’re working really hard to make sure that we do that and deliver those improvements.”
He said much of the organisation’s technology systems were old and the outage in Auckland was caused by a technology failure in its network infrastructure in one of Health NZ’s data centres, rather than staff shortages.
“We’re confident the failure won’t reoccur, we have monitoring on the hardware component that failed, and we’re doing a review of the outage as well.”
He said clinicians having to revert to pen and paper was not the way Health NZ wanted to work, but in a complex technological environment, failures occasionally happened.
Douglass said the first part of Health NZ’s 10-year digital investment plan was trying to make IT systems stable.
“The key message though is that we need investment. We are underinvested – we have been for many years, and the digital investment plan aims to address that.”
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