eHealth Saskatchewan technical glitch fixed

A technical issue that slowed down the delivery of online COVID-19 test results has been fixed.

Ian Hanna, the director of communications with eHealth Saskatchewan, said results were taking between three and five minutes to load from Monday until early Thursday morning.

“In the abstract, it doesn’t seem like it’s that much time, but when you’re logged in to a computer system waiting for a very important test result, it can seem like a long time,” he said.

“We just wanted to apologize to people. We understand there was a problem, and it has been fixed.”

The technical hiccup happened because of issues with two different computer systems — eHealth and Saskatchewan.ca — interacting with each other.

“The complexity in all of this is that it involved IT technicians from two different parts of the government, but they were really good and really fast. They got on top of it,” Hanna said.

As far as Hanna knows, high amounts of traffic from more people checking their results online did not help cause the glitch.

“We have more or less resolved that it has nothing to do with increasing numbers, because the numbers for MySaskHealthRecord have been increasing ever since the pandemic was declared. They have been going up steadily, and we had the problem just this week,” he explained.

“So far we have been able to keep up with demand, fingers crossed.”