A Florida hospital system is still using pen and paper and turning away patients in the emergency room nearly five days after it was hit by a cyber attack.
Tallahassee Memorial HealthCare, which serves 385,000 patients in 16 counties in north Florida and south Georgia, announced last Thursday that it had been cut.
But until Tuesday, the system remained offline, prompting medical professionals to use paper for prescriptions, appointments and examinations. The use of pen and paper may increase the risk of errors in drug administration, labeling of laboratory specimens, and planning procedures.
Some “limited” surgeries are now allowed to go ahead after all non-urgent procedures – such as hip replacements – are canceled from Friday to Monday. The hospital said it is also diverting some EMS patients.
It comes after a Russian cybercriminal group claimed responsibility for the destruction of 14 hospitals, including Stanford Healthcare in California and Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles.
Tallahassee Memorial Hospital is still using pen and paper nearly five days after the cyber attack (see above).
Above is the location of Tallahassee Memorial HealthCare (red dot) and the four areas it serves (blue). About 385,000 people live in the region
In its latest update on Sunday, the hospital said it was making “progress” in resolving the IT security issues to bring the hospital back online.
Online, the site still displays a red banner at the top: “Warning: Tallahassee Memorial is currently managing an IT security vulnerability.”
The FBI has been notified of the cyber attack, but has yet to confirm whether they have opened an investigation.
Tallahassee Memorial Hospital is one of Northwest Florida’s leading health care systems.
Medical records of 42 MILLION Americans have been leaked since 2016, reports show
Half of the hacks caused ambulance delays, canceled operations and problems with digital prescriptions.
In its 772 beds, it cares for emergency patients, expectant mothers, cancer patients and people with heart disease, among other things.
In 2020, 143,000 emergency rooms were visited, 17,300 operations were performed and 3,780 births were registered. It employs 4,500 people.
Cyber attackers use a network of computers – usually infected with malware and controlled remotely – to connect to a website simultaneously.
The hackers can then overwhelm a website’s security servers by connecting thousands of times simultaneously.
As a result, anyone trying to view the site ends up in a “traffic jam” of users connecting and getting error messages.
After the alarm went off, the hospital immediately switched to pen and paper and postponed all non-emergency procedures until Monday.
It also began to reject emergency patients and admit only the most serious trauma cases from the province of Leon, where it is based, and the immediate area.
In its latest update Sunday, the hospital said: “Our teams responded quickly by initiating our incident response protocols, including taking our systems offline as a proactive safety measure and reporting the event to law enforcement.”
They added: “Our teams are working around the clock in collaboration with external consultants to investigate the cause of the event and safely restore all computer systems as quickly as possible.
“IT security incidents take time to investigate and resolve. Our investigation is ongoing and, as usual in such situations, we understand it will take time to establish exactly what happened.”
It was not known who might be behind the attack.
Last month, the Russian cybercrime group Killnet claimed it had shut down the websites of 14 American hospitals across the country.
Attacks on US health care systems and other groups have increased following the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Other targets include US banking giant JPMorgan Chase, which was hit in October.
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Crystal Leahy is an author and health journalist who writes for The Fashion Vibes. With a background in health and wellness, Crystal has a passion for helping people live their best lives through healthy habits and lifestyles.
