16 hospitals and more than 160 other medical facilities across the United States are offline after the latest cyberattack on a U.S. hospital system by an as-yet-unknown attacker.
The hospital network is run by Prospect Medical Holdings and operates in California, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Rhode Island providing tertiary medical centers, academic teaching hospitals, behavioral health facilities, community hospitals, and long-term care facilities.
Network outage
The hospital chain took its network offline on Tuesday (01/08/23) after discovering that they were the subject of a ransomware attack.
The lack of network capability has forced the hospital staff to resort back to traditional methods of dealing with patient notes using pen and paper. This will have a substantial impact on how quickly patients can be seen and coupld potentially lead to misdiagnosis of patient conditions and drug administration.
Outpatient closures
The network outage has meant that all outpatient centres run by the company have closed, causing patients to have to wait for treatment, or seek alternative facilities.
