Some critical IT systems at Waikato hospital were out of action for 36 hours before being restored late on Thursday night, according to a hospital spokeswoman. Staff were forced to use manual systems when the patient administration system failed.
The cause of the crash is yet to be determined, but HP spokesman Jeff Healey has confirmed a team of HP staff, including one flown in from Australia, helped get the systems up and running again.
Healey says there was nothing in system logs to suggest it was a hardware failure, but the root cause is yet to be determined and HP is assisting in the root cause analysis.
Waikato hospital is "a critical customer and it runs critical systems, which is why we got the local team and the best help in to speed the recovery," Healey says.
Computerworld understands problems with the hospital's Unix systems may have contributed to the crash.
Waikato Hospital spokeswoman Karen Bennett says the systems were restored at 10.30pm on Thursday and that the patient administration system failed, forcing staff to use manual systems.
Some staff didn't receive overtime or shift work payments, she says, but did receive their base pay. No data was lost, Bennett says.
The Waikato District Health Board is investigating the outage. In a statement, chief executive Jan White said the investigation would be held "over the next few weeks".