Posted at 5:00 am
The new laboratory information system the government is rolling out at its hospital laboratories across Quebec suffered a widespread outage Wednesday morning. For more than an hour and a half, the nine hospitals previously connected to the system have been forced to switch to manual mode and only process urgent samples.
In a note sent to all staff around 11am Wednesday morning, the CIUSSS de la Montérégie-Centre said that “the laboratory’s computer system is currently down”. “The duration of this outage is having a significant impact on our operations and response time. Only STAT and emergency analyzes will be performed,” reads the note obtained by La Presse.
The outage affected nine hospitals connected to the new provincial laboratory information system (SIL-P), namely the CHUM, the Suroît Hospital, the Cité-de-la-Santé Hospital, the CHUS Fleurimont, the CHUS – Hôtel- Dieu, the Granby Hospital, Barrie-Memorial Hospital, Pierre-Boucher Hospital and Charles-Le Moyne Hospital.
“We had to switch to manual and paper mode. It leads to some chaos. And a definite work overload,” notes Mélanie Leblanc, President of the APTS Executive at the CISSS de la Montérégie Centre. Ms Leblanc says she doesn’t know how many samples were slowed by the collapse. “But the inquiries that we get from emergencies represent a large volume,” she says.
As this is a province-wide outage, the CISSS de la Montérégie-Centre sent questions from La Presse to the Ministry of Health and Social Care (MSSS), which was unable to answer them on Wednesday. At the CHUM, those responsible for communication indicated that “the services experienced a slowdown in the morning that was quickly absorbed in the afternoon and [qu’]no samples were rejected”.
The president of the APTS at CHUM, Nathalie Moreau, specifies that during the breakdown, the laboratory results were sent by fax to the emergency room. “We don’t yet know the reason for the outage,” she said.
main project
Launched last fall, SIL-P aims to implement a single new computer system across all 120 hospital laboratories in the province. Five different companies currently offer LIS in Quebec. And according to MSSS, there are “more than 70 versions of systems that don’t communicate with each other” on the healthcare network.
The health network’s laboratories process 189 million samples a year. In particular, the analysis of these samples allows the detection of infections, cancer and various types of diseases.
Beginning in the fall, the implementation of the new SIL-P encountered problems that forced the government to slow down the pace of implementation, as reported by La Presse in December1.
In an investigation out Friday, La Presse will detail the whirlwind development of the $165 million project.
Wednesday’s outage is another tile to fall on that ambitious IT contract. It’s all happening while the province’s laboratories are under a lot of pressure, particularly from staff shortages. In February, Quebec’s two medical associations wrote an open letter to denounce the “failed deployment” of the SIL-P and asked Health Minister Christian Dubé for emergency intervention.
To be read on Friday: “Computer Shift: New system, new setbacks”