This appeared a few days ago:
Cairns Hospital suffers software ‘catastrophe’ with possible loss of patient data
Daniel Bateman, The Cairns Post
May 25, 2017 2:33pm
UPDATE: THE State Opposition has attacked Labor over an IT glitch that has hit five Queensland hospitals following attempts by the State Government to protect Queensland Health’s system from a ransomware attack.
During Question Time for the final parliamentary sitting day of the week, Shadow Health Minister John-Paul Langbroek said the Palaszczuk Government had presided over another IT bungle.
“If it isn’t health payroll, it’s critical e-patient records crashing, sending the health system into meltdown at the Princess Alexandra, Lady Cilento, Cairns Base, Mackay and Townsville hospitals,” he said.
“Queenslanders can’t trust Labor to manage our health system when they can’t manage a simple IT security upgrade.”
EARLIER: Health Minister Cameron Dick has assured no patient safety has been compromised due to a major software failure at Cairns Hospital.
The Minister told State Parliament this morning the ransomware attack, which had impacted personal computers and computer networks operated by privat enterprise and governments across the world, had not resulted in any breaches to Queensland Health security.
He said security patches loaded to protect the system, including Cairns Hospital’s Digital Hospital software, had resulted in “making logging on and off the ieMR (integrated electronic medical record) system difficult for some users.”
“While this is causing inconvenience to staff, I’m advised that there have been no patient safety issues and our hospitals are operating as usual,” he said.
“While a large number of users remain on the system, full downtime procedures, for which staff have been trained and are ready, including reverting to paper systems as necessary, are operating as required.”
It has also been revealed that Cairns Hospital called a “Code Yellow” alert yesterday, as a result of the software failure.
Code Yellow usually signifies the emergency department has reached maximum capacity, involves staff being called in to support the flow of patients through the hospital.
It also means a loss of essential services, including software systems.
Mr Dick said he had been advised the impact of the logon issues may result in some delays to patient admission or discharge.
Lots more earlier material omitted. Here is the link:
Lots of other coverage is around from the Courier Mail, The Australian, Fairfax and even Xinhua
I guess there must be one or two Queensland Health employees who are a little nervous after the bungled update?
David.
10 comments:
Within this is a real issue, political parties are so hell bent on one-up manship they fail to address the real issues, that no one trusts any of them to control the bureaucracy that fails all the time because it lacks leadership and technical capabilities. It's like expecting an illiterate person to run a library
or a historian/journalist to run an eHealth agency?
As the saying goes...
"No matter who you vote for, the Government wins!"
"Shadow Health Minister John-Paul Langbroek said the Palaszczuk Government had presided over another IT bungle." ......... another IT bungle ... he must be referring to the IBM Payroll disaster presided over by the Liberal Gov/t?
Worth reading the report into the qld rail fail. It provides an insight into causes of why fails end up being surprises instead of known and dealt with issues. It could also be used as a reference point to map the future failure of the Opt out. By my reconning the ADHA is probably a little disconnected from itself, running in all directions with a raft or work known by only an iscolated few, uncontrolled and ineffective. By January it will begin to fall apart and blaming and buck passing will begin. It will expose that inexperienced people at a national level have not scaled to the challenge and there is no technical leadership.
I shall return in January to apologise or restate it as fact.
It needs to be appreciated that the Health Department and Paul Madden have overriding control while the ADHA and Tim Kelsey carry all the 'responsibility' and therefore will bear all the blame for failure while cudos for any success will be claimed by the Department.
As Mr Madden might say .... Heads I win, tails you lose.
June 2018 is already been changed to end of 2018 looking at the Senate estimates. I don't quite get the savings claim but then not sure what the model is or what the total cost figure is that the saving are against.
As for technical leadership? This is a communications matter not a technical matter, what role is there for IT in Health Information Technology
One of the major claims for "savings" is that there will be a reduction in tests - i.e. some un-necessary tests will be avoided.
According to the government's statistics up to the end of the week 21 May, in the 5 odd years since the PCEHR/MyHR went live there have been 42,393 Pathology reports and 48,117 Diagnostic Imaging Reports uploaded.
Even assuming that these reports have appropriate information in them, and that half could have been avoided, that would have saved at an absolute maximum 45,000 tests.
If each test cost the government $1000 then that's a saving over 5 years of $45million.
A more realistic estimate is probably well fewer than 10% i.e 4,500 tests, which is a saving of up to $4.5million.
Not bad for an investment of $2billion.
And you don't even need a spreadsheet to do this sort of back-of-a-menu estimate.
Interesting when it's presented, do these committees even care? It would seem cheaper if SA just kept the 900 pathology staff on than get sucked into these over priced technology traps. can't fire you IT system no matter how much it costs.
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