Officials representing Burien’s St. Anne Hospital told The B-Town Blog on Monday, Oct. 17, 2022 that systems that were taken offline due to a recent ransomware hack are now in the process of being restored.
As we previously reported, the hack caused several outages at the hospital since around Oct. 5, and also affected all Virginia Mason Franciscan Health (VMFH) facilities.
Some patients said that at one point, even the elevators weren’t working, and that patient records and lab results were unavailable as well.
St. Anne’s parent company, CommonSpirit Health, was the victim of the ransomware attack, where hackers demanded payment after taking over, locking down and disabling software systems.
It is still unknown whether a ransom was paid to the hackers or not.
“As systems come back online, our providers will be able to access their patients’ electronic health records, and patients will be able to use the MyChart patient portal,” officials told The B-Town Blog on Monday. “It will take some time before we can restore full functionality and we continue work to bring our systems up as quickly and safely as we can.”
VMFH also said that their providers are now able to access their patients’ electronic health records, and some system functionality – including patient access to the MyChart records system – is expected to be available in the coming days.
Any other updates, such as what this may mean for efforts to reschedule patient appointments, will be forthcoming.
“Throughout this process, we have taken steps to protect our systems and maintain continuity of care,” they added. “We are only taking steps to restore systems when it is safe and secure to do so. We thank our patients, clinicians, team members and the community for their patience.”