A Health Service Executive call centre received an "excessive volume" of about 2,800 phone calls a day from irate medical card holders, pharmacists, dentists and doctors after the medical card database crashed for nearly a week.
GPs were unable to register new medical cards or to check the validity of cards for nearly a week, and pharmacists were unable to upload details of reimbursements due to them due to the glitch.
Records released under the Freedom of Information Act show IT staff worked through the night for several days to try to fix the problem after it first emerged on August 3rd.
The HSE has called in its software provider to review the outage at the Primary Care Reimbursement Service (PCRS).
More than two million people in the State have medical cards or GP-visit cards.
The eligibility of about 10,000 people for medical cards may also have been dropped without any prior warning or review as a result of the outage, the records reveal.
The problem also hit school transport, as it was not possible to verify the children of families with medical cards were eligible for free bus services due to the system outage.
A primary care service in the south east contacted the HSE to say the unavailability of the database was causing “huge difficulties” and that it had affected its ability to order vital supplies such as oxygen.
On August 4th, the IT team realised the issue was “a lot more severe” than originally suspected and that it required more recovery than first estimated. The root cause of the issue was “data corruption”.
Social media teams contacted the PCRS to say they had had a number of queries on Twitter and that people were becoming “more irate” as the days went on.
The call centre that handles calls for medical card queries wrote to the PCRS customer service team on August 5th to say it averaged 2,800 calls per day that week.
By August 8th, only a “tiny” percentage of the calls received during the outage were being resolved and the centre expected “in excess of 7,000 contacts from customers in addition to the normal daily volumes”.
A member of the HSE’s IT team wrote that in “simple terms” the outage was caused “by pieces of software technology interacting together in such a way to bring the database offline in the context of a storage shortage”.
Professional services engineers from the software provider Oracle have been called in to review the incident, to make recommendations and to provide assurance that the issue will not recur.