GPConnect Glitch

Name and Constituency of Member of Parliament
Ms Joan Pereira
MP for Tanjong Pagar GRC

Question No. 2281
To ask the Minister for Health in light of the IT glitch in the computer system of clinics where patients received mislabelled medicines (a) what corrective action has been taken to ensure that the IT system is robust and secure; and (b) what measures are being taken to prevent such future incidences.

Name and Constituency of Member of Parliament
Assoc Prof Daniel Goh Pei Siong
Non-Constituency MP

Question No. 2293
To ask the Minister for Health what led to over 100 clinics prescribing the wrong dosage for 800 patients and whether there were any adverse effects for the affected patients.

Oral Reply
1       Following a system upgrade by a IT vendor for GPConnect implemented on 1 September, some GP clinics encountered problems where some medication labels were printed wrongly. While the correct medication and the total quantity of medication were correctly dispensed, the system printed the wrong Unit of Measurement (UOM) on the label.

2        Several clinics were aware of the error and manually corrected the dosage instruction on the label. Once notified, Integrated Health Information System (IHiS), the public healthcare IT agency and owner of the GP Connect system, investigated the incident, informed all affected clinics from 2 September, and provided support to the clinics.

3        IHiS has been monitoring the situation. No further errors have been reported since 3 September. Affected patients were monitored by the clinics and to date, there have not been any reports of adverse effects.

4        Investigations revealed that the IT vendor had made some changes to the application code which resulted in incorrect medication labels being printed. These changes were unrelated to the upgrade. Hence, the user acceptance tests designed to evaluate the upgrade did not pick up the error. The vendor also did not report any errors from other tests done.

5        Since the incident, additional rounds of testing have been conducted to ensure that existing functions within GPConnect are working as designed. The “Unit of Measurement” function is also being enhanced to prevent future errors.

6        IHiS is also thoroughly reviewing testing procedures prior to future software rollouts to prevent such occurrences. In addition, they will step up monitoring of software rollouts and improve their response to better support users.