Server rebuild to tackle Synergy issues

ISoft – now part of CSC – is planning to rebuild a virtual server because of continuing problems with Spine functionality for some of its GP customers.

An NHS Connecting for Health ‘summary higher severity service incident report’ says that on 21 June, all Synergy 2.0 users were “unable to perform successful spine functionality for [Personal Demographics Service] synchronisation, Choose and Book integrated referrals and electronic prescriptions.”

This was due to a performance issue in the time taken to process messages on the Synergy 2 message handling service server.

The report says this is an ongoing issue and despite taking action to fix the problem, it is still happening every 14 to 16 days.

“As this issue still persists after multiple actions failing to resolve the issue the next action will be to schedule a rebuild of the virtual server over a weekend,” the report says.

“As this will result in a period of outage, this may take a few weeks to be completed due to change requests that will have to be raised.”

“In the meantime, a weekly reboot will be scheduled for a Friday night outside of core business hours to attempt to prevent an outage during core hours.”

The report says everyone will be made aware of the planned rebuild of the serverand notified of the date once it has been approved by CSC’s Healthcare Change Board and the CfH Change Board.

A spokesman for the company said it is “employing a work-around while we determine the root cause” of the problem and that this is not causing an issue for customers.

ISoft has 11 higher severity incident reports filed from December last year until June. The first four involve data centre outages and the next seven involve data centre issues.

While EMIS, INPS and iSoft all have a number of reports available online, CSC (local service provider for TPP) and Microtest have none.

The reports also reveal that some EMIS Web users have been reporting slow speeds and performance issues.

A major incident report from late April says; “Multiple sites have reported degraded performance issues when using third party applications in association with EMIS Web (ie Docman).”

Other reports describe slow speeds followed by a short outage for a number of trusts. All incidents were resolved.

The EMIS user group website has a discussion thread about the speed of EMIS Web, on which one practice complains that it is slower than when they had EMIS LV.

“We have been having problems with slow speed and system freezing intermittently on different people and in different areas,” one commenter says.

“I rang Emis and 13 practices had the same problem. Emis rang me today and they think problem is now fixed.”

When asked about issues with the speed of EMIS Web, an EMIS spokesperson said that because it is a hosted system, its performance can be affected by a practice’s N3 connectivity.

“Practices with poor N3 connections have sometimes experienced particularly large patient records being slow to load,” the spokesperson said.

“In addition, a software issue was recently identified which could occasionally make the system run slowly when looking at past consultations – this has been resolved on the latest patch.”

Link to serious incident reports on CfHhttp://www.connectingforhealth.nhs.uk/systemsandservices/gpsupport/gpsoc/performance/supplier/hssi/index_html