Janil Puthucheary on recent IT system outages at public healthcare institutions

The main cause of two recent IT system outages at public healthcare institutions was the failure of hardware devices in data centres, said Senior Minister of State for Health Janil Puthucheary. In Parliament on Monday (Sep 12), he explained what was known so far and said his ministry was investigating the incidents with the manufacturer of the IT hardware to rectify any weaknesses. There were no signs of security of the affected systems being compromised and a lack of manpower at Integrated Health Information Systems (IHiS) was not to blame. The outage on Aug 27 affected 26 IT applications including electronic medical records, appointments, pharmacy and laboratory systems. Seventeen public healthcare institutions including the acute hospitals, community hospitals, specialist outpatient clinics and all polyclinics were affected. On Sep 5, an outage affected eight public healthcare institutions and two of the three polyclinic groups. Dr Puthucheary was responding to Parliamentary questions in the House.