(CMR) The Health Services Authority's intranet computer network has been down since Thursday, January 2 2020. Employees and patients are claiming that they are being severely impacted by the outage. The system issues impacted phones over the weekend and employees are still unable to process emails and conduct administrative work that requires computers.
The outage means that staff are unable to update records, input prescriptions and cannot electronically check patients in. This has caused some delays in several departments including the pharmacy where yesterday patients were waiting about 45 minutes for prescriptions.
Well placed sources have indicated their computer services department is unable to fix the issue and have hired CISCO engineers to assist with the issue. They have been on site attempting to rectify the situation. Not only is the outage impacting employees within the organization it is also impacting patient services according to some. One patient shared that this has “brought the referral system to a halt”.
In particular, Brac customers are unable to obtain travel vouchers in order to come to Grand Cayman for their doctor's appointments. They further shared:
“It's bad and patients are the only ones suffering. They have no idea when this will be fixed and this outage should not be downplayed.”
CMR understands that the Cerner System, the HSA's electronic health record system used for patient management has not been impacted by the outage.
UPDATE: The HSA issued a statement today confirming that a hardware failure has impacted the authority's administrative functions. However, they assert that this has had no impact on patient care and that the core clinical system (Center) is fully functional.
HSA CEO Lizzette Yearwood acknowledges however that email communications are still affected and apologizes for any inconvenience experienced. Persons wishing to contact the HSA for urgent matters are advised to call 949-8600. The Authority has also established a temporary email address [email protected] for urgent email inquiries.
They are hoping to restore systems “as quickly as possible.”
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