E-Health system outage leaves boy without medication, triggering four epileptic seizures
A technical outage in Latvia's E-Health system prevented a mother from buying urgently needed epilepsy medication for her son, leading to several seizures after a five-year gap. Authorities are now working on clearer crisis-response procedures.
Twelve-year-old Deivids has a rare genetic condition, tuberous sclerosis, which caused him to develop epilepsy requiring medication at precisely scheduled times. The day before the new school year began, his mother Lāsma went to a pharmacy to collect medication not registered in Latvia, prescribed electronically by his doctor. At the pharmacy, she learned that a technical malfunction had taken the E-Health system offline, making it impossible to dispense the medicine.
Lāsma contacted E-Health support but received no clear timeline for when the system would be restored. She was advised to obtain a paper prescription from the family doctor, but that doctor practices outside Riga, complicating matters further.
Although the system was later restored, the gap in medication coincided, according to the mother, with a serious deterioration in her son's condition. On September 1, Deivids suffered four epileptic seizures after five years without any. Lāsma stressed the need for a clear action plan for situations where someone urgently needs medication at a pharmacy.
Overload caused the outage
Latvia's Digital Health Centre explained that on the day in question, one of the medical institutions' information systems attempted to upload an excessively large volume of documents simultaneously, overloading and disrupting the system. The centre advises residents not to leave medication purchases until the last moment and to keep small reserves on hand. When the electronic system is unavailable, medical practitioners are permitted to issue paper prescriptions under existing regulations.
The Ministry of Health states that the E-Health system's overall performance is currently considered stable, with outages becoming less frequent and shorter. Following a storm at the end of August, the ministry and the National Health Service have been examining how to respond when electronic systems are unavailable. Proposals for ensuring medication availability during crisis situations are being prepared, though a concrete action plan is still under discussion with the relevant institutions.
