NJ hospital CentraState diverting patients after cyberattack, IT shutdown
CentraState Medical Center in New Jersey, Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids), and Queen Elizabeth Hospital (QEH) in Barbados are facing continued disruptions due to cybersecurity incidents in the last few weeks.
The ongoing outages confirm earlier warnings from American Hospital Association’s National Advisor for Cybersecurity and Risk John Riggi for the healthcare sector to remain vigilant as threat actors would remain highly active during the holiday season.
As seen with the latest Emsisoft ransomware data, ransomware attacks against the healthcare sector have remained constant in recent years. In 2022, 25 providers and their 290 hospitals were impacted by these attacks — the most notable of which was the CommonSpirit Health incident launched in the fall.
While two of the latest incidents are impacting global providers, the disruptions and the successful processes should serve as lessons for the U.S. sector and the need to prioritize patient safety when building incident response processes.
CentraState Medical Center reports care diversion processes
With a Dec. 30 post on its website, CentraState is the most recent provider to fall victim to an apparent cyberattack. Officials say the hospital is facing “some technical problems related to an IT security issue” and are operating under care diversion processes, sending incoming patients to area hospitals in response to the network outages.
The hospital is operating under electronic health record downtime procedures with paper processes, which has enabled the hospital to continue logging patient care through available records on site. Officials assert that patient care has not been adversely affected.
CentraState CEO and President Tom Scott explained to local media that the systems began showing signs of disruption during the morning shift change and the hospital isolated the affected systems in response, while shutting down the network to prevent proliferation.
Local EMS providers were also notified of the need to divert patients away from CentraState for an unspecified period of time, as it’s unclear just how long the outages…
