Tan Kiat How apologises for public healthcare IT outage, calls it 'preventable lapse'

Senior Minister of State for Health Tan Kiat How on Tuesday (Nov 3) apologised in parliament to patients, families and healthcare workers impacted by a 9.5-hour disruption to services across Singapore’s public healthcare clusters on Oct 13.

He said it was due to a “preventable” lapse by a contracted service provider, which failed to complete a required security update to a shared domain name system ahead of a scheduled global change.

The disruption impacted services across all three public healthcare clusters – NHG Health, the National University Health System (NUHS) and SingHealth.

About 4,000 outpatient appointments were rescheduled, and some patients experienced delays of up to two hours. No adverse patient-safety incidents were attributed to the disruption.

National health technology agency Synapxe is reviewing the provider's contractual obligations and will take appropriate action for any established lapses, Mr Tan added.

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