There is no indication that the ongoing system disruptions affecting some services across several healthcare institutions in Singapore are related to a cyber incident, national health technology agency Synapxe said.
Singapore’s three public healthcare clusters — NHG Health, National University Healthcare System (NUHS), and SingHealth — have since Tuesday (Oct 13) morning, experienced connectivity issues.
This, in turn, affected services such as appointment booking through call centres, visitor registration and billing enquiries.
Patients and visitors have also reported experiencing longer waiting times for some services.
When AsiaOne visited NHG Kallang Polyclinic and Tan Tock Seng Hospital at around 3pm, there were more staff than usual at hand to assist visitors and patients with registration.
However, the situation was observed to be orderly, with operations proceeding as usual.
AsiaOne understands that staff members from MOH Holdings’ subsidiaries had earlier reported issues accessing systems such as Microsoft 365, including Outlook mail services.
At the time of this article’s publication, internet access remains unavailable in some of the subsidiaries.
In a statement posted on its social media, NHG Health said that the call centre lines remain temporarily unavailable, adding that its healthcare institutions are also experiencing system disruption to some services.
Meanwhile, NUHS said in a separate statement posted on its social media that its institutions are experiencing technical disruptions.
SingHealth has, so far, only reported that the Singapore General Hospital’s outpatient appointment bookings and changes, visitor registration and billing enquiries are affected.
Technical teams working urgently to resolve the issue: Synapxe
In its statement posted just about 2.30pm, Synapxe said that it understands the inconvenience caused, especially for patients and visitors at public healthcare institutions.
“Please be assured that our technical teams are working urgently to resolve the issue and restore services as soon as possible,” the agency said, apologising for the disruption.
It added that there is also “no indication that this is a cyber incident.”
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