COI Report – Part VII
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425 (c) Teaching,
research and education, and innovation i) Temporary ISS has made it more challenging to conduct literature research for statistical and epidemiological support. It has also impaired teaching opportunities. Due to the proliferation of personal and research organisation laptops, there is also anew challenge of how to safeguard and monitor the data being stored on such laptops.
1142. In the short period of time after temporary ISS was implemented, workarounds have been deployed for all the work streams affected by ISS, and there was little impact on patient care in the short term. In particular, a key workaround was providing sufficient separate devices for internet-surfing. While this was no doubt resource-intensive for
the public health institutions, it is now a sunk cost. Another key workaround relies on human effort, where staff have to be more meticulous in (a) using internet-surfing devices to do their last mile checks before prescribing treatment and (b) transcribing data onto/from internet-surfing devices and (c) servicing and maintaining hospital equipment.
1143. On the implementation of ISS after the Cyber Attack, Prof. Ivy in her evidence said There has been some loss of productivity. People are working longer and harder. People are using their mobile phones and their own devices to do some of the work that they need to do, but there has
been relatively little noise, I would say, about it. Even though I think there is hope that we will review it at some point, and, certainly, we
work with MOH to look at this, but, you know, staff have taken it in their stride, because I think that the horror of our patients' data having been breached is an unacceptable risk at this point for us to even consider just opening to internet again. So we certainly hope the virtual browser platform, other solutions will come to play in the future. But I would say,
at this point of time, there are
