Sydney power outage kills e-health systems

Doctors in hospitals within Sydney's west had to temporarily turn back to pen and paper on Saturday when their electronic health record systems went offline, while more lost access to email.

(Credit: Motion Computing)

According to a spokesperson for the state's Health Support Services division, which handles IT and shared services such as datacentre services for NSW Health, the outage began around 9am on Saturday morning.

Power utility Integral Energy had been doing some maintenance around the area of Health Support Services' datacentre in Cumberland, which meant that the datacentre was running on back-up power.

Unfortunately, during this time a circuit breaker tripped and power was lost for 45 minutes. When it came back on, Health Support Services had to reboot and test programs before clinical systems could come back online. This took until 1:30pm, with further services such as email restored by 7:00pm.

Around 90 hospitals in the greater western, greater southern and Sydney west areas were affected by the outage, losing services such as email and intranet.

Nine hospitals were further impacted, unable to access clinical services such as the newly rolled out Cerner electronic medical records system. This meant that doctors and nurses had to record patient notes using pen and paper.

Despite reports that some records were lost, no data went missing, according to the spokesperson for Health Support Services. "All of our data is backed up several times a day. None of the data was lost," the spokesperson said, adding that all the outage had meant was that doctors and nurses couldn't enter new information into the records.

Health Support Services is not sure as yet why the circuit breaker tripped. It now has independent engineers looking into what happened to kill the backup. "The ultimate backup when electronic records fail is pen and paper and will always be pen and paper," a spokesperson for NSW Minister for Health John Della Bosca said.

Since October, 20 out of 180 hospitals within Health Support Services' care have been fully moved onto electronic medical records and this number will increase during the 18-month roll-out, which will eventually see all hospitals sporting the system.