The HSE’s new €82 million computerised procurement system is set to be delayed by at least 12 months into 2025 due to the impact of the cyberattack back in May.
As the Irish Examiner reports, the go-live date for the body’s Integrated Finance and Procurement System (IFMS) has been delayed until at least March of that year due to the ransomware attack.
At that point, the HSE plans to have at least 80 per cent of its procurement covered by a single system. Just under a quarter of HSE procurement in 2018 was non-compliant.
That followed an initial redraw of the plan for IFMS implementation last September on foot of delays caused by the onset of Covid-19. The system, first mooted in 2014, was initially slated to go live in March of 2024.
The HSE said that it had been in the process of replanning the project due to the impact of the coronavirus when it was hit by last May’s devastating cyberattack, which it said “severely impacted communications, access to systems and to online collaboration tools, and access to key stakeholders and governance members who were involved in critical clinical and business continuity activity”.
Non-compliant procurement
In January 2020, immediately prior to the onset of the pandemic, the HSE's director of parliamentary affairs Ray Mitchell acknowledged that it was impossible for the HSE to assess its levels of non-compliant procurement due to its reliance upon “multiple legacy systems”.
A subsequent review ordered into all procurement for 2019 has since been shelved due to Covid, and it is “not intended to go back and recommence” that investigation, the HSE said, which has been superseded by a similar review for 2020.
The levels of non-compliant procurement for 2020, a year in which the scramble for Covid-related medical devices and products led to such expenditure going through the roof, were estimated in the HSE’s recently published financial statements.
Some 63 per cent of the executive’s expenditure for transactions greater than €25,000 last year was non-compliant, a total spend of €1.25 billion, per self-assessment returns filled out by the HSE’s own budget holders.
“The board of the HSE is committed to resolving the systemic issue of non-compliant procurement across the HSE and the wider health service,” it said.
It emerged last week, via an internal audit review of the HSE’s procurement of ventilators from China during the early stages of the pandemic, that the HSE is owed €35.2 million in refunds for devices that were prepaid for and never delivered
