EMIS Health, formerly Egton Medical Information Systems, is the most widely-used GP practice IT system in England, in use at more than half of GP practices across the UK.
On the morning of Friday, 4 November, GP practices across the country—including in London, Cheshire, and Bristol—reported an EMIS IT system failure and took to social media, mainly the platform X, to express their concerns.
At a busy time of the week, the IT system failure stopped GPs and other staff from seeing patients and doing their work as there was no access to patient records and appointment booking systems.
On the morning of Friday 4 November GP Practices across the country including London, Cheshire, and Bristol reported the system failure
An EMIS spokesperson said: "The issue has been resolved."
Director of Product Management at Lakeside Software, Matthew McGuire, said: "The recent outage really shows how important it is to have proactive IT strategies in place."
He explained that this situation evidenced how vulnerable essential services can be to unexpected issues.
"So many organisations are still very reactive to the issues in their environment. By taking a proactive approach, organisations can identify and avoid risks before they turn into major problems," McGuire suggested. "Using advanced monitoring tools and predictive analytics, IT departments can stay ahead of potential issues and keep the business’s network and services running smoothly and be less exposed to risk in day-to-day operations."