A big hospital IT crash in the South Island in mid-January was caused by a third-party hardware failure, Health New Zealand says.

It had earlier said a similar outage later the same month in Auckland and Northland was due to a technical failure at a commercial data centre.

Health NZ's (HNZ) 10-year digital upgrade plan depends on external data centres doing better than it can.

The southern outage on 13 January took out systems doctors and nurses need, forcing them to use paper for 36 hours at hospitals in Dunedin, Invercargill, Lakes and some rural areas.

Systems were progressively restored through that period.

It impacted "a range of clinical systems in Te Waipounamu", HNZ acting chief IT officer Darren Douglass told RNZ.

The outage ran from 3.21am on 13 January until 3.30pm the next day.

"We are working with the vendor and internally reviewing opportunities to speed up the response and restoration," he said.

A review was underway.

"All major incidents are subject to post incident reviews, which focus on root causes and corrective actions, and commence immediately following an incident once immediate response and restoration activities have been completed."

It was not clear if that included debriefing staff to check what the impacts on them and patients were.

HNZ was quick to downplay the impact of the four IT outages last month on patients, but unions said their members reported stress and chaos on themselves.

"We take safeguarding the integrity of public information and data very seriously," Douglass said.

HNZ earlier said all four outages in January were due to technical issues, and three were due to "third-party vendor issues".

The agency has been turning to external vendors, which include big cloud-computing operators, more and more.

Key IT projects it has promised will cut wait times and boost care for patients have anchor contracts with US Big Tech companies.

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