Digital health system crash prompts investigation

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This article was published 07/09/2019 (2606 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The province will investigate how a “series of cascading failures” caused a computer network crash this week, taking Manitoba’s entire digital health system offline for several hours, the provincial health minister says.

“No matter where you are in government or the private sector, we rely on technology, and when technology doesn’t work, there is an impact,” Health Minister Cameron Friesen said on Friday. Backup systems meant to prevent a lengthy outage didn’t work as planned when the first software crashes were discovered early Thursday in Manitoba’s e-health network, leading to an IT crash that caused widespread delays for patients across the province.

All hospitals, long-term care centres and community health centres were affected. Information such as patient charts, test results, hospital admissions and discharges — even staff schedules — had to be tracked manually, slowing the health system down and causing backlogs officials were still dealing with as of Friday afternoon. The outage lasted less than 36 hours, Friesen told reporters during a conference call at 5 p.m. Friday.

“We know that when the first systems failed yesterday, we have redundancies built in to be able to repair the system… In this case, those redundant systems themselves failed to activate properly. We will be investigating that,” he said.

“I can tell you there will be learning as a result of this. We want our systems to be strengthened, to be robust and to be as reliable as possible.”

The crash seemed to be caused by software failures, not human error or outside threat, Friesen said. “I’ve been told that, in this case, it was just a series of cascading failures in our IT backbone that supports all our systems.”

Extra doctors, nurses, clerks and other health staff reported for duty in light of the system failure to help care for patients as quickly as possible, working into the night Thursday.

Staff followed “downtime protocols,” such as taking information with pens and paper, and delivering information via fax or by hand instead of using computers, said Krista Williams, chief health operations officer with the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority.

“We do recognize, however, that there were delays in care, so I want to acknowledge that,” she said.

“Given the significant outage, that did slow our operations down, and by slowing it down, people had to wait longer. What was important was that we put the downtime procedures in place, we brought in extra staff (to ensure patient care),” she said. “That was our priority.”

Williams acknowledged the outage meant it was more difficult for emergency room staff to keep track of the volume of patients ambulances brought in, and some ambulances may have been diverted to other ERs as a result.

katie.may@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @thatkatiemay