Another IT outage impacts southern hospitals, staff left in the dark

Health New Zealand said the latest outage impacted the hospital administration system across the South Island. Photo / 123rf

By Tess Brunton of RNZ

Another IT outage has struck southern hospitals, impacting access to patient health records for several hours on Wednesday.

It was the latest in a series of outages that have impacted hospitals on both islands this month including South Island clinicians losing access to patient records that tracked medication and lab results for more than 12 hours last week.

Health New Zealand (HNZ) said the latest outage impacted the hospital administration system across the South Island from early in the morning until it was restored before 9.30am, but patient care continued safely throughout.

An HNZ employee, who RNZ has agreed not to name, said the most recent outage meant they could not access real-time data as they were left with paper forms.

They were frustrated as they had been left in the dark about what happened, and no one seemed to follow up to find out how staff and patients were impacted or the clinical risk, they said.

The outage alert, which RNZ has seen, told clinicians to use “offline downtime forms” as the South Island’s patient care system was experiencing issues sitewide with users facing error messages and delays.

It was being treated as a high priority and was impacting applications including whiteboards and MedChart, the alert said.

HNZ Te Waipounamu regional digital director Kirsty Martin said the outage was not related to previous outages or a cybersecurity incident.

“The system holds a record of the patient journey through the hospital and passes information to downstream applications such as Health Connect South, which were temporarily impacted,” she said.

“Normal business continuity plans were enacted during the incident, which included manual processes to keep services running safely, while digital staff worked with vendors to fix the issue.”

HNZ was undergoing a debrief to identify the cause, the extent of the outage and potential ways to improve its systems, she said.

- RNZ