Hospital "network collapse" incident and the promotion of electronic medical records implementation

At the conference to announce the results of implementing BAĐT at hospitals in the city and standardizing the data warehouse of the city's health sector organized by the Ho Chi Minh City Department of Health on September 26, Associate Professor, Dr. Tang Chi Thuong, Director of the Department of Health, said that the city's health sector identified digital transformation and data warehouse standardization as the core foundation to improve management effectiveness and efficiency, improve the quality of health care and people's satisfaction.

In particular, BAĐT is not only a tool to replace paper medical records, but also the key to opening the era of smart healthcare, improving treatment quality, optimizing management, contributing to building a modern, fair and transparent healthcare system.

Dr. Nguyen Anh Dung, Deputy Director of the City Department of Health, said that as of September 26, the entire city had 153/164 hospitals implementing BAĐT (reaching a rate of more than 93% of the entire system). Of which, the city's public hospital sector achieved a rate of 100% with 60/60 hospitals putting BAĐT into operation according to the roadmap, the ministry and sector hospitals achieved an almost absolute rate with 13/14 units having implemented it. In the non-public sector, although the number of facilities is large and diverse in scale, there are still 80/90 hospitals that have implemented it, accounting for more than 89%.

The rate of hospitals implementing BAĐT in the whole hospital is high, in which 64% of public hospitals and 65% of private hospitals have completed it at the whole hospital scale. In terms of investment form, most hospitals choose to hire IT services to optimize costs.

The Director of the Ho Chi Minh City Department of Health stated that the scale of medical examination and treatment facilities in the area is very large, so the synchronous implementation of BAĐT at all medical examination and treatment facilities is truly a huge challenge for the entire city's health system.

Regarding the recent software disruption at Gia Dinh People's Hospital, Dr. Truong Huu Khanh (Children's Hospital 1) said that patients can easily know about network failures or software disruptions, but most patients do not know about slow networks, and only think that medical staff are intentionally slow or doing something to "fiddle" with the computer, not completing procedures for patients. "If the infrastructure is not stable, digitalization or BAĐT will not have enough time to directly care for patients," Dr. Truong Huu Khanh commented.

This incident occurred on the morning of September 24 due to a network error that forced all procedures to be done manually, causing congestion at all stages, hundreds of patients waiting in line, affecting reception and medical examination activities in some areas, especially the outpatient examination block.

Ms. Luu Trang, a relative of a patient who went to the Gia Dinh People's Hospital for a check-up, shared: "On the day she "lost her life", my mother went to the hospital for a check-up. After writing by hand, when she got to the Pharmacy Department, she couldn't read it to get the medicine, so when she got online, she had to re-enter the information from the beginning to print the prescription on the computer to get the medicine..."

Immediately after the incident, the hospital deployed urgent remedial measures, mobilizing technical staff to coordinate with relevant units to quickly restore the system. By 11:00 a.m. the same day, basic medical examination and treatment activities were restored.

Source: https://cand.com.vn/y-te/su-co-sap-mang-benh-vien-va-viec-day-manh-trien-khai-benh-an-dien-tu-i782613/