Technology can speed up many processes, with healthcare being one of them. But on the flip side, things can slow down to a crawl when it goes wrong. Such is the case with Hospital Sungai Buloh as it goes through a system breakdown.
A source to The Star said that the hospital’s main server had been out of order since last Friday. The hospital has since been running on backup servers. This leaves medical staff having to track down and update patient details by hand, slowing down the healthcare process tremendously.
The source also said that the Hospital Sungai Buloh server had suffered frequent breakdowns. But none of the prior episodes had lasted this long. One possible cause is the fact that the current system was bogged down by limited storage, as it was still running Windows XP.
Microsoft has stopped supporting this operating system since April 2014. Barring one security patch following the Wannacry incident, the OS has not received any form of updates.
That said, this may not entirely be an issue with the software. It entirely possible that the entire issue may be hardware related, or a combination of both. Dr Kuldip Kaur, the director of Hospital Sungai Buloh, said that the Total Hospital Information System was experiencing technical issues, but didn’t elaborate on what the nature of those issues were.
This situation can be compared to the network failure situation in KLIA and KLIA2 last year. Old and likely faulty network switches were the cause of the failure, and replacing them saw the airport network regain stability. The old switches were in use since KLIA began operating in 1998.
(Source: The Star, The Malaysian Reserve. Image: Hospital Sungai Buloh / Facebook)
