Health Minister Shannon Fentiman reveals cause of system outage that impacted 24 Qld hospitals

Health Minister Shannon Fentiman has revealed the cause of a system outage that impacted 24 Queensland hospitals, with the situation labelled an “absolute nightmare”.

Princess Alexandra Hospital was one of 24 hospitals impacted by a system outage on Wednesday.

A widespread system outage across Queensland’s largest hospitals which lasted hours was likely caused by an overzealous firewall Health Minister Shannon Fentiman has revealed, as a review of incident kicks off.

Queensland’s health disaster centre was put on high alert on Wednesday after the “integrated electronic medical record” or ieMR system crashed for 8.5 hours between 8am and 4.30pm.

Clinicians were understood to be frustrated with the need to revert to old school paper-based methods, while a health worker at one of the 24 impacted sites described the situation to the Nurses’ Professional Association of Queensland as an “absolute nightmare”.

Health Minister Shannon Fentiman says an overzealous firewall was the likely cause of Queensland Health’s computer system outage. Picture: Steve Pohlner

The ieMR system, which pulls together different core programs into one platform, started experiencing log on issues from about 8am on Wednesday and was back up about 4.30pm, in an unexpected turnaround after earlier expectations the root cause of the mysterious may not have been known for days.

ieMR, progressively rolled out to hospitals since 2014, exists to replace paper-based clinical charts and gives staff the ability to access real time patient information and log important observations like their vital signs.

It is understood to be the longest consecutive outage of the ieMR system in recent years, with a patch in November 2022 causing short spurts of downtime over two days. The main vendor of ieMR is Oracle Health, who was contacted for comment but has not responded.

Ms Fentiman confirmed all impacted hospitals were back using the digital system.

“We have heard from the vendor of the system, the cause of the outage, was a firewall hardware issue,” she said.

“They have now moved to another firewall. And that’s why the system is now working as it should.”

“I do want to be very clear that there’s been no risk to cyber security and no patient confidentiality has been impacted.”

The Opposition took umbrage at Ms Fentiman not fronting up to take questions about the system outage on Wednesday, with a Queensland Health eHealth clinical director speaking to press instead.

Ms Fentiman said the issue had been very technical and operational as it unfolded. She said she was getting briefed regularly.

“The advice was it’s probably best to let a clinician and an expert on the system give those answers, and that’s what happened,” she said.

“We were doing everything we can and as you can appreciate, it was constantly changing. We were having to get that information from a vendor (as) we don’t own or run the system.”