Vaccine IT failures
Glitchy systems plagued by data vulnerability and backlogs due to high volume of Covid cases
THE 20-year-old IT system tracking Covid-19 cases has yet to be updated effectively, despite assurances from health officials.
Over the Christmas period, our monitoring system faced a backlog of 9,000 cases as it was incapable of monitoring more than 2,000 cases a day. Dr Philip Nolan of NPHET announced in early January that features were then added to the system to allow it to cope with the very high volumes.
However, Dr Marie Casey, a public health specialist with the HSE, said earlier this week that the system needed be updated as a matter of priority. Speaking on a webinar held by the Independent Scientific Advocacy Group (ISAG) who are lobbying for a ‘zero-Covid’ policy to be adopted in Ireland, Dr Casey
‘We need some proper support systems’
said: ‘We need to have some proper support systems in place for public health, we need an IT infrastructure.’
In 2019, Hiqa reported that the Computerised Infectious Disease Reporting (CIDR) information system – used by our public health teams to track outbreaks – needed to be ‘fit for purpose’ to cope with future demands.
Dr Casey said: ‘That [system] has had issues throughout the pandemic and has required quite a bit of stabilisation. We were on the cusp of buying a new outbreak management system at the start of this pandemic.
‘So, we had just received approval at the start of this year to buy a system from Wales, which would actually allow us to record our information about our outbreaks and our advice given etc, so essentially the medical record for each outbreak. But that is not yet in place, because of other commitments or public health Wales and, I suppose, our own lack of ability to contribute time to do further development.’
Earlier this week, the Irish Daily Mail also highlighted IT issues facing the monitoring of our Covid-19 vaccination rollout.
A whistleblower contacted the paper when they discovered an error in the system which allowed them to access the data for everyone in the country who had been vaccinated. They were alarmed at the level of access available to anyone with the ability to upload data into the system. Around 3,500 people can access this database.
Details such as an individual’s PPS number, their address, name, age, mother’s maiden name, date of birth, phone number, email address and where they were vaccinated were exposed.
The system, developed by Salesforce and IBM, is still in a developmental stage as daily figures on vaccinations have not yet been provided as promised since the beginning of the rollout at the end of December 2020.
Dr Casey also highlighted issues with the system currently in place: ‘We don’t have a national immunisation system. That’s important right now especially with a multidose vaccine. Down the line, people may need to show evidence that they have been vaccinated, so a system will be needed.’
Dr Casey also called for upgrading public health specialists to consultant status, in line with international standards, to attract qualified staff to the area.
The lack of public health staff to cope with the demands of the pandemic is also a major problem. Dr Casey called for regionalising our contact tracing system, which would also help with the retrospective tracing promised by the HSE back in autumn 2020.
She said: ‘We need to regionalise our contact tracing. So the centres remain but we need to have delegated contract tracers for each region, because I think that will contribute to our own understanding of transmission and it will also help with source investigation.’
HSE chief Paul Reid said this week that increasing staff numbers to support public health teams has been ‘challenging’.
Last year, 250 people were employed across our public health teams, this has risen to 480 people. A recruitment campaign is under way to employ a further 255 people for deployment in the regional public health teams as well as the Health Protection Surveillance Centre. Employing for senior roles in the HSE’s public health teams was described as ‘particularly challenging’. Another aspect of supporting public health teams is connecting them more closely with contact tracing teams on a more ‘aligned basis’.
claire.scott@mailonsunday.ie
‘We must regionalise our contact tracing’