Senior Minister of State for Health Tan Kiat How apologises for 9-hour public healthcare IT disruption 

SINGAPORE: In a speech in Parliament on Tuesday (Nov 3), Senior Minister of State for Health Tan Kiat How addressed an outage affecting public healthcare services that lasted more than nine hours last month.

On Oct 13, more than 4,000 outpatient appointments needed to be rescheduled after services for NHG Health, the National University Health System (NUHS) and SingHealth were impacted by a lapse in performing a required security update.

The affected services included appointment bookings, visitor registration, medication dispensing, and billing.

Acknowledging the inconvenience the outage caused patients and their families, as well as the additional work that healthcare providers needed to do because of it, Mr Tan said that the lapse from a contracted service provider had been preventable, adding that it "We apologise. It should not have happened."

However, he assured Parliament that no adverse patient safety incidents have been attributed to the outage in services. More importantly, Mr Tan added that essential care went on as usual, as the three public healthcare clusters put downtime procedures in place.

What went wrong

The Senior Minister of State explained that while Synapxe, the national health technology agency, had arranged for the service provider to carry out the security update, it had not done so.

Synapxe is now reviewing the provider's contractual obligations and will be taking appropriate action for lapses that have been established. 

“Regardless of the outsourcing arrangement, Synapxe remains accountable for the resilience of its critical systems,” he added.

Synapxe announced by the evening of Oct 13 that the outage had not been caused by a cyberattack, Mr Tan noted, adding that patient data had not been compromised or accessed by those unauthorised to do so.

The agency is currently bolstering its systems in order to ensure faster recovery, and the government is strengthening resilience as well, with the Health Ministry overseeing corrective actions to ensure that they are effective.

"Digitalisation brings important benefits to healthcare. But as our systems become more interconnected, resilience must improve too. We must make our technology more reliable, while ensuring healthcare workers can continue caring for patients safely even when technology fails,” Mr Tan added. /TISG