Doctors and pharmacists in Cyprus’s General Healthcare System (GHS/GESY) are battling recurring software failures that have disrupted patient care for six months, with the problem intensifying this week despite promises of a fix.
The system crashes almost every Monday and has now begun failing on other days, according to healthcare providers who spoke to Phileleftheros. The timing could not be worse, with infections surging and patients queuing for treatment.
“We’ve known for six months that almost every Monday the software will have problems. Now it’s not just every Monday,” a personal doctor said.
The software manages prescriptions, test results and patient records across the General Healthcare System. When it fails, doctors resort to writing notes on paper and entering them into the system at night when it recovers.
“We can’t read analyses or other tests; we can’t enter prescriptions for medicines. Essentially, it’s as if GHS doesn’t exist at this moment,” a second doctor said.
Pharmacists face similar chaos. They cannot process prescriptions, or patients arrive expecting their prescriptions to be ready, only to find the doctor was unable to enter them into the system.
“We’ve despaired. Either we try to process prescriptions and the software won’t let us, or patients come here and think their doctor entered their prescription but the doctor didn’t manage it,” a pharmacist said.
The Health Insurance Organisation (HIO) has been trying to solve the problem for more than a year. The issues began in October 2024 following internal changes at the company managing the IT system under contract with HIO.
In spring 2025, after intense complaints from health providers, HIO and the company committed to Parliament that the problem would be resolved in the following months. The frequency and intensity have decreased, but health professionals say it returns almost every week.
“It’s not that the system always crashes completely and we have no access at all. But it delays a lot and takes us a very long time to make just one entry. It crawls,” a doctor explained.
When doctors report problems to HIO, they are told individually that only they have an issue and that their own computer is at fault. But doctors speak to each other and know they all receive the same response.
This week’s problems started Monday and continued Tuesday, with patients waiting outside while doctors had no access to the system.
According to sources, HIO received fresh assurances yesterday from the managing company that the problem would be resolved early next week.
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