Ohio Hospitals (OVMC And EORH) recovered from EHR Downtime after Ransomware Attack

OVMC (Ohio Valley Medical Center) and EORH (East Ohio Regional Hospital) both were affected by the ransomware attack on November 23, 2018 (i.e. on Friday). Because of this incident, the ambulance patients have been transported to other nearby hospitals, and admissions to emergency room were restricted to the walk-up patients only.

During the breach, no patient information has been compromised. EORH and OVMC worked to protect the financial and health information of patient by shutting their EHR system down, and then moving to paper charting for the clinical operations. After the hospitals' network got hit by a ransomware attack, both hospitals voluntarily initiated period of the EHR downtime.

Now both EORH and OVMC have recovered fully from sustained time period of the EHR downtime after their computer network got hit by a ransomware attack and need not have to pay ransom to the hackers, as per Wheeling News-Register.

In fact, EORH and OVMC had made significant development in restoring their EHR system by the time weekend (i.e. November 25, 2018) was over. Only partial diversion of the emergency room traffic was required in between Monday (i.e. November 26, 2018) and Wednesday (i.e. November 28, 2018). The computer network of hospitals emergency rooms was restored by them by the night of November 28, 2018, and thus they are now not diverting the patients to various other care sites.

Karin Janiszewski, EORH and OVMC Director of Marketing and Public Relations, told the Register that "as of 10 p.m., our EMSTAR emergency departments are off of diversion. Computer software capabilities have been fully restored and EMS can transport patients to our EDs without issue".

As per the Times Leader, Janiszewski told them that EORH and OVMC were not paying ransom amount to the hackers for restoring their system. Janiszewski also told the Times that "it is not necessary because we have redundant security and ransomware was only able to make it through our first layer of security but not the second".

The IT teams of the hospitals' have been successful in restoring the EHR technology in emergency departments of EORH and OVMC fully without outside help.

"Now, our IT crew is rebuilding the front of the software programs -- the entry area -- and until that is fully functional, we will stay on a yellow status in the ER," Janiszewski explained.

» SPAMfighter News - 12/7/2018