A joint update from the five southwestern Ontario hospitals affected by a recent ransomware attack says due to the current impact on the hospitals’ systems, doctors may not have access to important patient information including medical history and medications lists.
The attack on Oct. 23 targeting Bluewater Health, Chatham-Kent Health Alliance, Erie Shores HealthCare, Hôtel-Dieu Grace Healthcare, Windsor Regional Hospital and their shared service provider, TransForm Shared Service Organization, caused an outage of some online services forcing the hospitals to postpone and reschedule many surgeries and appointments.
Millions of sensitive files were also stolen as part of the attack, some has since been published online after ransom demands were denied.
In a release issued Wednesday, the hospitals offered an update on the recovery process and the limitations as a result of the cyberattack.
At this time, physicians may not have access to past patient records or medical history, patients’ current medication lists, reports from other clinicians involved in care and pre-admission workups.
Some physicians may have to cancel procedures if there is an absence of important information and they feel it is unsafe to proceeds, officials say if this is necessary, doctors will do what they can to reschedule as quickly as possible.
The hospitals also note while some systems are function, they are slower than usual and require extra time. This will impact access to labs and diagnostic imaging.
“We want to emphasize to our patients that our physicians and frontline staff are under greater than normal stress due to these unusual circumstances, and they are responding with incredible resolve. We ask the public for their understanding during this time,” the update says. “This has been a challenging situation for employees, professional staff, patients and families, and we thank our community and system partners for their ongoing patience and support.”
Hospital officials say clinical and non-clinical systems have been impacted as they rely on a safe, secure network. Their experts have advised the safest route forward is to rebuild the network.
The hospitals plan to do that through a five phase recovery process:
- Containment: Contain the cyber attack — complete
- Identification: Identify the cause of the cyber attack through a forensic investigation — ongoing
- Remediation: Strengthen and add additional protections to the network — ongoing
- Restoration: Bring back applications and systems, based on clinical priority — ongoing
- Monitoring: Continue monitoring of traffic into and out of the network. —ongoing
While the hospitals say the restoration process is on track, it will still take time for all affected critical systems to be back completely online.
The hospitals say after discovering the attack, they immediately started the process of restoring digital patient charting. The restoration is expected to be complete by mid-December.
Delays for patients will be reduced once digital charting is restored, however, some patients and families may still experience diagnostic and treatment delays while work continues to restore all systems.
An investigation into the incident is ongoing to determine the specific individuals whose data may have been taken, this is expected to take a number of months.
A patient cybersecurity hotline has been established. For inquiries, please call: 519-437-6212 from 8 a.m. to 11 p.m. Monday through Friday.
