IT failures at Guy’s and St Thomas’ hospitals in London have caused misery for doctors and patients and have also raised fears about the impact of climate change on data centers that store medical, financial and public sector information. The head of Guy’s and St Thomas’ trust, Professor Ian Abbs, apologized “sincerely” for the collapse, which he admitted was “extremely serious”. He was speaking nine days after hospital computers crashed on July 19 as a direct result of record-breaking heat. Key IT systems had been restored by the end of last week, but work was continuing to recover data and restart other systems. “The complexity of our current IT systems has made it difficult to recover,” a trust spokesman said. Without access to electronic records, doctors were unable to tell how patients were responding to their treatments. “We were flying blind,” said a senior doctor at St Thomas’. “Getting results from the labs was an absolute nightmare and involved porters carrying reams of paper to and from the lab. “However, people often did not specify where a patient was in the hospital. So there were groups of porters and lab staff roaming around the hospital blindly looking for a random patient. It was chaos,” he added. The loss of digital records also meant that the data controls that would normally help limit errors were absent. “Without a doubt, patient safety was compromised,” he said. On July 25, the trust was forced to ask other NHS services not to send non-urgent requests for blood tests or X-rays or other imaging scans. Digital patient care records have not been updated since July 19. Cancer patients reported that chemotherapy was canceled at short notice, while others were unable to contact the hospital at all. Warnings that the two hospitals’ IT systems were not operating at optimal levels were made last year when the trust’s board was told that many systems, including Windows 10, were not supported and the infrastructure had reached the end of its life. Minutes for a November 21 board meeting also noted that work had been carried out over the previous six months to try to mitigate these security risks by making regular repairs to the most vulnerable areas. Professor George Zervas, from University College London’s department of electronic and electrical engineering, said: “Computing is now vital to healthcare, with artificial intelligence being explored or used to support various tasks such as prognosis. For example, AI can use medical imaging scans to diagnose cancer. This means that the appetite for computing, communicating, storing and retrieving data is constantly growing. “At the same time, global temperatures are rising and that means power and cooling systems need to be much more efficient and resilient.” However, the continued growth of data centers also means they play a role in global warming. “By 2030, it is predicted that data centers around the world will consume the same amount of energy as the whole of Europe consumes today – which is huge,” Zervas added. Therefore, providing the additional power to run data centers over the coming decades will further strain the world’s ability to reduce carbon emissions. “We need to find ways to compute, store and communicate more data with significantly less energy consumption than today,” Zervas said. “We need to develop energy-efficient and high-performance networks and systems that are also more resilient, or we will face problems of significant IT system limitations and potential failures in the future.”
