A global IT outage that affected Windows computers across the country on Friday had “very minimal impact” on hospitals in Tasmania, the state’s Deputy Secretary of Hospitals and Primary Care Brendan Docherty says.
Docherty said the only issue experienced was with digital imaging of x-rays and reporting, which was resolved quickly.
“We use a third party vendor, which is IMED, in the north and north-west and they provide us with some digital imaging of our x-rays and reporting,” he said.
“So that was the only outage we saw across our health system. That outage was fortunately resolved quickly because we had those third party vendors on site at Launceston and therefore when we got the new scripts that was resolved quickly.”
He said staff were able to revert to manual processes until the system came back online.
“It did mean a lot of our doctors were going into medical imaging departments to look at films on screen as opposed to being able to access across the sites,” he said.
“So it was a bit more manually intensive for a few hours and then obviously when the system came back online they were able to access that as normal.”
Docherty said he had reached out to colleagues in the private system who reported minimal impact over the weekend.
“I don’t know any other details however, but the impact for us was minimal and absolutely no impact in the south at the Royal Hobart.”
“We always have redundancy, we always have business continuity plans, which is what we used on Friday night when we had the outage … we’ve got well documented systems and processes for business continuity should there be any electronic outage.”
