SNS Data Centre Failure Leaves Doctors Unable to Prescribe or Open Patient Records for a Morning Across Portugal
A failure at the SPMS data centre knocked out electronic prescribing and patient records from about 10:00 on Monday, and consultations were cancelled. Some systems were back by noon. What the rules say about paper prescriptions.
Doctors in hospitals and health centres across Portugal spent most of Monday morning unable to issue electronic prescriptions or open patients' clinical records, after a failure at the data centre of the Serviços Partilhados do Ministério da Saúde (SPMS, the health ministry's shared services agency), which runs the IT systems of the Serviço Nacional de Saúde (SNS, the National Health Service). SPMS told Lusa that the problems began at around 10:00 and that "by 12:00, some IT systems supporting health centres and hospitals had already been restored", RTP reported.
Público reported that the system began to recover "slowly" at around 12:30, and that the president of the family health units' association, USF-AN, said the problem affected the whole country. SPMS has given no cause beyond "constraints in the SPMS data centre", and had published no statement on its own website by early afternoon.
What stopped working
The Federação Nacional dos Médicos (FNAM, the National Federation of Doctors) raised the alarm. Its vice-president, Joana Bordalo e Sá, told Lusa at 10:30 that the Prescrição Eletrónica Médica (PEM, the electronic prescribing system) was "completely down" and that doctors could not issue "a single prescription". The Registo de Saúde Eletrónico (RSE, the electronic health record) was also unavailable, leaving doctors without patients' clinical history. She had reports from the São João, Matosinhos and Médio Ave local health units.
Observador found consultations being cancelled: a patient at Vila Franca de Xira hospital lost a sleep clinic appointment booked months earlier, and patients at the Carregado health centre were told their scheduled appointments and treatments could not go ahead. Xavier Barreto, president of the Associação Portuguesa dos Administradores Hospitalares (the hospital administrators' association), told the paper the fault hit SPMS systems that depend on web services. RTP also reported patients who could not get appointments or vaccines.
"Once again, this is entirely the responsibility of the Ministry of Health," Bordalo e Sá said, according to RTP, calling on the health minister, Ana Paula Martins, to explain why nothing had been done to prevent it.
What to do if you left without a prescription
- A handwritten prescription is allowed. Article 8 of Portaria n.º 224/2015, in the wording set by Portaria n.º 390/2019, lets doctors prescribe by hand, as an exception, when the IT system fails. Under the same article, the pharmacy is still paid the state's share of the price even if the exception is not verified.
- If a pharmacy's system is down. The dispensing rules of INFARMED (the medicines regulator) say the printed treatment guide (guia de tratamento) carries a code for each medicine so a pharmacy can read the prescription during a failure. Working offline, the pharmacy asks for the codes on the guide or in the SNS 24 app and may supply only one pack per prescription line.
- Limits. Under Article 23 of Portaria n.º 224/2015, dispensing during a system failure happens once, at a single pharmacy, and excludes controlled narcotic and psychotropic medicines.
- Cancelled appointments. Patients whose consultation was called off should contact their health centre or hospital to rebook. For health advice, the SNS 24 line is 808 24 24 24.
A recurring problem
Monday's failure follows others. In June, a nationwide outage that SPMS blamed on a power failure hit health centres, hospitals and pharmacies, and in September 2025 SPMS attributed a loss of access to clinical records to a software update by the telecoms operator NOS, Euronews noted. Last week, a survey of family health unit coordinators found that every unit that answered had at least one IT outage in the past year.
