RM29 million contract goes to same firm in charge of eHIS during Ampang Hospital crash

A company responsible for maintaining Ampang Hospital's information system when it suffered a major breakdown four months ago, forcing health ministry officials to step in, has been awarded a similar job at another government hospital in Johor.

Checks on the government's procurement website, ePerolehan, show that on July 24 the health ministry awarded the company a three-year contract worth RM29.1 million to maintain the Hospital Information System (eHIS) at Hospital Sultan Ismail in Johor, about RM10 million more than the contract it received in February at Ampang Hospital.

The awarding of the contract came three months after the eHIS system it was maintaining at Ampang Hospital broke down for more than 30 hours, disrupting patient admissions, blood test procedures and drug prescriptions for several days, and causing the postponement of treatments.

According to public health portal CodeBlue, Ampang Hospital, which was among the earliest in the country to introduce the fully computerised Total Hospital Information System (THIS), suffered system glitches more than 10 times last year, but the incident on April 23 was the first major outage.

“This issue has never happened before; it was the first time,” CodeBlue quoted an unnamed medical officer as saying, who also pointed to outdated software and hardware, including computers running on the obsolete Windows XP operating system.

The breakdown forced the hospital to activate a business continuity plan to ensure services were not disrupted, using manual means while the IT system was being restored.

Health Minister Dzulkefly Ahmad, who visited the hospital days later, said the ministry was “reviewing the procurement protocol to prevent transition gaps from recurring in the future”.

The assurance did little to assuage worries among staff about such a glitch recurring.

It is understood that ministry officials had to step in with solutions during the chaos that ensued at Ampang Hospital.

“The job is straightforward. When the system is down, you are to diagnose the problem and call the relevant principal to solve it,” said an industry source familiar with eHIS troubleshooting procedures.

Asked for a response, the managing director of the company involved said he had no comment, adding that the matter should be referred to the health ministry.

When contacted, Dzulkefly promised to check with the appropriate divisions for more details on the contract.

“I welcome you to conduct this investigation of any transgression or impropriety,” the health minister told MalaysiaNow.