Southern hospital IT outage caused by third-party hardware failure, Health NZ says

Dunedin Hospital was one of the hospitals affected. Photo/ RNZ, Nate McKinnon

By Phil Pennington of RNZ

A big hospital IT crash in the South Island in mid-January was caused by a third-party hardware failure, Health New Zealand says.

It had said earlier that a similar outage later the same month in Auckland and Northland was because of a technical failure at a commercial data centre.

Health NZ’s 10-year digital upgrade plan depends on external data centres doing better than it can.

The southern outage on January 13 took out systems doctors and nurses need, forcing them to use paper for 36 hours at hospitals in Dunedin, Invercargill, Lakes and some rural areas. Systems were progressively restored through that period.

It impacted “a range of clinical systems in Te Waipounamu”, Health NZ acting chief IT officer Darren Douglass told RNZ.

The outage ran from 3.21am on January 13 until 3.30pm the next day.

“We are working with the vendor and internally reviewing opportunities to speed up the response and restoration,” he said.

A review was underway.

“All major incidents are subject to post incident reviews, which focus on root causes and corrective actions, and commence immediately following an incident once immediate response and restoration activities have been completed.”

It was not clear if that included debriefing staff to check what the impacts on them and patients were.

Health NZ was quick to downplay the impact of the four IT outages last month on patients, but unions said their members reported stress and chaos on themselves.

“We take safeguarding the integrity of public information and data very seriously,” Douglass said.

Health NZ said earlier that all four outages in January were due to technical issues, and three were due to “third-party vendor issues”.

The agency has been turning to external vendors, which include big cloud-computing operators, more and more.

Key IT projects it has promised will cut waiting times and boost care for patients have anchor contracts with US Big Tech companies.

- RNZ