Global IT outage health service update

Work to resolve IT outages experienced on the morning of 19 July continued through the day on Friday and over the weekend. Our understanding continues to be that this was a faulty update from a software supplier to a number of Health and Social Care 3rd party technology partners. No cyber attack is suspected. No core HSC operated infrastructure or systems were impacted.

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We can confirm that three major hospital systems and one GP system were affected: Epic Electronic Care Record, Varian Radiotherapy System, Allocate eRostering System, EMIS GP System. The EMIS GP System is also used in the prison healthcare services operated by one of the hospital Trusts.  As well as losing core view and update functionality, a number of system integration components were affected – meaning that other connected services were also adversely impacted (e.g. orders and results coming to and from the laboratory services). Given we are part way through a number of major roll-out programmes, these issues affected our five hospital Trusts differently. The NI Ambulance Service and GP Out of Hours services were unaffected.

All teams including affected GP practices implemented their business continuity plans with a focus on ensuring those clinically urgent patients were managed first. This is a normal part of the HSC contingency arrangements. 

The core Epic Electronic Care Record system was back to operational state by around 09:00 on Friday morning, with integration technologies all resolved by Friday afternoon. Endoscopy imaging was the last interface service to be restarted at 18.00. The Allocate eRostering system was operational by 10:30 on Friday morning in some Trusts, with the latest coming online at 15:30 on Saturday afternoon. The Varian impacts vary across different Trusts and a full picture of that system outage is being collated.

There are numerous ‘instances’ of our EMIS system and these have been brought back online as our 3^rd party partner has worked to apply and test the appropriate corrective actions to each instance. Prisons is a 24/7 service and was brought back online at 16:45 on Saturday. The other instances that serve GP practices were also fixed, operational and tested by 21:00 on Saturday evening. This means that all GP practices will have core system access for beginning of normal business on Monday, although some non-core interfaces such as Emergency Care Summary and Key Information Summary that do not affect direct patient care may be later in week. Detailed communications are being issued to all affected GP practices for Monday morning.

It will take some time to ascertain exactly what the operational impact of the outages were, as services recover from Friday’s issues. Initial assessments are that there has been minimal impact or cancellation to patient care in hospitals. The sorts of impacts that are beginning to be returned include: theatres and scopes continued but delayed start time for radiotherapy clinics and some theatre timing slots, and some issues with respect to staffing over the weekend but these were mitigated and workarounds put in place. A more definitive position, including an assessment of the impact on GP practice business on Friday, will be developed in the coming days.

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