Atlas False Positive Allergies on 13/08/25

Summary

On 13.08.2025, Person Centred Software experienced a critical incident that affected Atlas users. We recognise the disruption this caused and want to share a transparent overview of what happened, how we responded, and what we’re doing to prevent recurrence.

Root Cause

After a detailed investigation, we determined that the incident was caused by:

• The deployment of an enhancement of the Allergy functionality caused false positive allergies to be flagged by the system and incorrectly set the allocation of the related items to ND (patient allergic). 
• False Positive allergies were created for those items with no active ingredient and mapping to no known allergies/non-drug related allergies.

Timeline of Events

Resolution

The issue was resolved by:

• Changes were implemented in the database code related to the allergy functionality to sever the link between items not containing an active ingredient from  non-related drug allergies or no known allergies.
• Allergy functionality was restored by 18:00, and functionality has remained working as expected since.

Customer Communication

During the incident, we communicated via Status Page at regular intervals, pharmacies were advised to contact Support if concerned and care homes were directed to contact their pharmacy. We acknowledge the importance of timely, accurate updates and are reviewing how we can improve this further.

Preventative Measures and Next Steps

To reduce the risk of recurrence, we are:

• Adding additional monitoring to our deployment procedure
• Introduce enhancements to new functionality testing
• Conducting additional post deployment checks.