A system glitch at the Total Hospital Information System used in Malaysia’s northern state of Kedah forced doctors to do it manually for at least a day.
On August 11, tHIS went offline due to a malfunction in one of its application servers, disrupting services at public hospitals and healthcare facilities in the state, including the 500-bed Sultan Abdul Halim Hospital, the Sungai Petani Public Clinic and a nursing training institute.
WHY IT BUSINESS
A system failure usually occurs during rush hours, when traffic is heavy.
However, the downtime lasted more than 24 hours and an estimated 3,000 patients affected at Sultan Abdul Halim Hospital, local news reported.
The failure at tHIS had major consequences for patient registration and access to medical records. Doctors had to write their referrals manually and nurses had to confirm the prescribed medication for each patient.
The problem also led to backlogs and delays in treatment, but the extent of these has not yet been determined.
The Kedah State Health Department has since activated its business continuity plan to mitigate the impact of the system outage, director Dr Ismuni Bohar said in a statement the next day.
“Corrective actions and monitoring of system access performance are now being taken to ensure that this issue is comprehensively addressed,” said Dr. Bohari. “The department will also continue to monitor developments and ensure that HIS’s recovery and restoration activities proceed smoothly so that patient care services are not affected.”
No further details were provided about when the system would be fully restored.
After this major IT incident, a plan was made to migrate the tHIS system to a cloud server.
“As part of the long-term initiatives, the Ministry of Health and the Kedah State Health Department plan to upgrade the existing (tHIS) system to a cloud-based system to prevent such incidents from happening again,” said Dr Bohari.
THE BIGGER CONTEXT
In Malaysia, at least one-tenth of all public hospitals are running on HIS. Of these, 10 are known to have adopted the digital tHIS, while the rest use a hybrid or manual system. The tHIS integrates clinical, administrative and financial systems into one paperless system. It was first implemented at the 960-bed Selayang Hospital in Selangor.
The implementation of HIS in Malaysian hospitals is slow due to factors such as limited or missing technical knowledge, lack of funding and interoperability challenges.
A similar system for the dental sector was also recently reported as experiencing several operational challenges, including frequent system outages during peak hours. Teleprimary care Oral health Clinical Information Systemwhich has been in use in over 100 clinics across the country for over two decades, also has a slow interface that reportedly contributes to inaccurate and outdated patient records.