One of the nation’s largest health systems, Ascension, is responding to a cybersecurity incident that is impacting clinical operations and access to medical records.
Ascension Catholic Health System has 140 hospitals and 40 senior care facilities in 19 states and the District of Columbia with approximately 134,000 employees.
The health system issued a statement about the incident. “On Wednesday, May 8, we detected unusual activity on select technology networking systems, which we now believe is due to a cybersecurity event. At this time we continue to investigate the situation. We responded immediately, initiated our investigation and activated our remediation efforts. “Access to some systems has been disrupted as this process continues.”
Ascension said its care teams are trained for these types of disruptions and have initiated procedures to ensure patient care continues to be safe and with as little impact as possible. “There has been a disruption to clinical operations and we continue to evaluate the impact and duration of the disruption.”
He Detroit Free Press I was able to interview several doctors about the event. “There was a security problem, so they shut down the system,” one doctor told Free Press. “It’s affecting everything.”
Another Ascension Michigan doctor told Free Press: “We have no access to medical records, no labs, no radiology or To see the x-rays, you call the laboratory and they tell you the results over the phone, so it is much more cumbersome, but we have training for these moments.
Ascension said it hired Mandiant to assist in the investigation and remediation process, and notified the appropriate authorities. He is also reaching out to business partners to ensure they are aware of the situation and can take appropriate steps to protect their systems.
