I work in NHS primary care and use a clinical system called EMIS Web. For sometime it has become increasingly unstable, freezing, crashing and more specifically running out of memory. Support for the past year has been almost non-existent with all of their workforce working from home and unwilling to escalate problems beyond “turn it off and on again”. For a software system so critical for safe patient management this is completely unacceptable and you only have to read through the constant streams of Facebook group post from irate users to understand how widely this is affecting practices across the UK.
For my pennies worth I’ve long suspected, despite it being known as a 64 bit application, that it is 32bit software running in 64bit Windows 10 (apart from the practices that are still, unfortunately, on Windows 7!!).
Is there a sure-fire way to check if an application is 32 or 64 bit? I have admin rights in Windows 10 so I can dive into protected folders, unlike most of my colleagues.
All our Dell PC’s have only 8Gb of system RAM. This should really be enough unless EMIS Web only has access to half of this, or less than half. This may explain the constant crashes and messages of “ran out of memory” - although recently things have become so unstable that it doesn’t even have enough memory to display this message and simply exits without warning, often during a doctors consultation, losing everything - several times a day, for everyone.
If it is a 64bit application, does it have enough from the paging file? Or is there a memory leak - how would I check that?
I feel like I need to do something. Things are stressful enough trying to organise and run Covid vaccination clinics without these constant disruptions. Other than talking to NHS Digital directly it is a total waste of time brining my concerns to the developers of the software who are unwilling to discuss these issues beyond the simple “workarounds”.