An update on the continuing recovery from a cyberattack that crippled the University of Vermont Health Network’s computer systems shows significant progress, but work continues on a number of systems.
On October 28th a cyberattack disrupted the UVM Health Network’s electronic medical record system, phones, internet and computer systems. Recovery has been gradual. A major milestone was accomplished in late November when IT teams restored full access to the hospital’s electronic medical records system.
On Tuesday UVM Medical Center President and Chief Operating Officer Dr. Stephen Leffler reported significant restoration in other areas has occurred over the past few weeks including most radiology systems. “We had 600 of our applications impacted on October 28th and more than 70 percent of them are back and functional. We really did not anticipate the scope or the impact the attack had on our system and how far reaching it was. We had amazingly good strong plans for three days of down time, five days of downtime, which is what we’d experienced in the past. But 30 days of downtime and going across all systems was a true challenge for our staff. It was a challenge for our patients.”
Leffler says the cyberattack targeted the largest hospital of the UVM Health Network: the UVM Medical Center. He adds the impact on other facilities in the six-hospital system, which includes the Central Vermont Medical Center in Berlin, Porter Medical Center in Middlebury and Champlain Valley Physicians Hospital in Plattsburgh, was much less. “The impact for the Medical Center, which is where the attack occurred, was much greater and much broader in scope. It impacted our radiology services. It impacted our radiation oncology. It impacted our sleep studies. Everything here was involved in some way. For our partner institutions thankfully the impact was much smaller and in general patients were able to get everything they needed there throughout the pandemic and in fact we sent we sent patients to our partner institutions. We sent some chemotherapy patients to Plattsburgh, to Central Vermont. We sent patients for x-rays to all of our sites when appropriate. So the impact was smaller. But as services have come back that has brought back the small number of issues that they were facing and have been corrected there as well.”
Leffler anticipates significant revenue losses due to IT damage, restoration of systems and loss of daily revenue. “All of our financial systems were down as well. Our CFO at the medical center, literally on the back of an envelope, thinks that our revenue was down about 1.5 to 1.6 million dollars a day in services that we couldn’t do. And we actually haven’t calculated the cost of bringing the system up yet or all the cost of extra people here to care for patients because we just did what had to be done. We probably won’t know the full cost impact until February or March but we have started doing some of that work now. But it will be very significant.”
Areas that are still working to restore systems include sleep studies and orthopedics. Staff are working to upload a backlog of manual records and imaging taken while restored systems were offline.
