A huge outage on Friday afternoon was bedevilling big businesses. Let’s hope healthcare providers escape the carnage.
The week began positively with the Australian Digital Health Agency’s information down in Canberra – probably the most encouraging two hours from the Agency in many months.
Our publisher Jeremy Knibbs was there and came away feeling much energised. You can read his coverage here and here, as well as the full text of ADHA CEO Amanda Cattermole’s speech, here.
If the response online is any indication, many of our readers were impressed with Wesfarmers’ move to bring Kate Munnings, the chair of the Digital Health Cooperative Research Centre, on to its board.
Then there was the news of the data breach at Healthed Australia, with contact details for the company’s many GP clients exposed through a vulnerability on its website. Quickly fixed, to be sure, and thankfully, no credit card details compromised, but not good news for either Healthed or the GPs, nevertheless.
Then, just last night, news began filtering in of a massive outage affecting major institutions in Australia and internationally.
From about 3.50pm outages were reported at Foxtel, Microsoft 365, Bendigo Bank, NAB, the NBN, Commonwealth Bank, Suncorp, Xero, Telstra, the ABC, me bank, the ANZ, Optus, Westpac and Google.
At the time of writing, no healthcare providers were affected. Fingers crossed that’s still the case when you’re reading this on Saturday morning.
The source of the problem appeared to be CrowdStrike, a US-based cybersecurity provider, whose “Falcon sensor” is installed on countless Windows machines worldwide.
Brace yourselves.
Meanwhile, over the next several weeks Health Services Daily is going to take a deep dive into the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare’s MyHospitals data.
State by state, we’re going to be looking at the best-performing hospitals in terms of emergency department waiting times, elective – sorry, “planned” – surgery waitlists, workforce, safety and quality, access and whatever other measures we can find data on.
We’re starting with New South Wales because it’s the biggest public health system in the southern hemisphere.
We’re going to try and talk to the people who run those hospitals, particularly – and this may surprise you, readers – the best ones. We want to hear from the ones who are doing it right. Or at least as right as is possible under the current circumstances.
It’s not going to be a witch-hunt. We want to find out what works and what doesn’t, and what keeps hospital administrators up at night.
After a year of producing HSD we have learned a lot, but there is still plenty to understand. And we want to get the facts from the people at the coalface.
So, if you see an email from myself, or our senior reporter Harriet Grayson, be not afraid. We come in peace, with a curious agenda. We really want to talk with you, at your convenience.