GP system incident reports published

A new set of serious incident reports from GP clinical systems suppliers were published on the NHS Connecting for Health website this week.

The website now carries Higher Severity Service Incidents reports for each GP supplier and a monthly GPSoC Supplier Higher Severity Service Incident and Permanent Fix Summary.

In the first round of reporting, only EMIS has reported a severe incident, dating from 11 November last year.

Thirty-two practices were without the EMIS Web system for 19 minutes when “a kernel panic in the firmware of the Brocade switches that connect the care record servers with the storage area network.”

EMIS’s HSSI report says the connection was restored automatically when the switches recovered, and the care record server was restarted.

“We have opened an incident with HP, the suppliers of the equipment, to investigate why a pair of high availability switches failed simultaneously,” the report says.

EMIS Group chief executive Sean Riddell said the switches were set up to have “no single point of failure”, but for some reason two switches failed causing an “inelegant close down”. The incident did not cause any data corruption.

A GPSoC supplier report for November also shows that the following systems are SCR compliant; EMIS LV, TPP SystmOne, iSoft Synergy and INPS Vision. Eighty per cent of English practices use these GP systems.

A CfH spokesperson said both EMIS Web and Microtest were developing SCR functionality and plans indicated that both systems should achieve full roll-out approval for SCR this summer.