NOTICE PAPER NO. 1455
NOTICE OF QUESTION FOR ORAL ANSWER
FOR THE SITTING OF PARLIAMENT ON 20 OCTOBER 2022
Name and Constituency of Member of Parliament
Mr Dennis Tan Lip Fong
MP for Hougang
Question No. 3643
To ask 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 setting any interim, shorter term goals for the reduction of downtime during outages.
Answer
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 minimize the impact during outages.