Debated in Parliament on 20 Oct 2022.
Mr Dennis Tan Lip Fong asked the Minister for Health (a) what is the cause of the disruption to the electronic medical system on 29 September 2022; (b) how long does the Government expect the review of the system design and architecture and the eventual system upgrade will take; and (c) pending a complete review and system upgrade, whether the Ministry is also be setting any interim, shorter-term goals for the reduction of downtime during outages.
The disruption to the electronic medical records system on 29 September 2022 was the result of a software error in the firewall of a backup data centre.
The root cause has been fully rectified with improvements to the network and disaster recovery design. We will upgrade systems when this is assessed to be necessary. We are also reviewing our downtime and business continuity processes to minimise the impact during outages.
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