Hospitals Urged to Forgo Computers as Cyber Threat Grows

Hospitals should practice treating patients without their computer systems to prepare for potentially disruptive cyberattacks, health leaders have said. Luis Taveras, executive vice president and chief digital and information officer at Jefferson Health, said hospitals’ reliance on technology can leave clinicians struggling to operate when systems suddenly go down – an experience he said caused “panic” during a recent outage at Jefferson. Taveras said his teams, which once installed batches of security patches monthly, now have to patch systems every day as attacks become more frequent.

They’re very smart people, and they’re looking for ways to attack us every single day.” In February, a ransomware attack forced the University of Mississippi Medical Center to temporarily close roughly three dozen clinics, cancel elective procedures and switch to manual operations after its electronic health record system was disrupted. Cyberattacks on hospitals can have deadly consequences. A study published in February in the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy found in-hospital mortality was 34% to 38% higher among patients already admitted when an attack began.

Rather than focusing solely on preventing attacks, Taveras said Jefferson is putting greater emphasis on resilience. Taveras said the goal is not only to prevent cyberattacks, but to ensure hospitals can recover quickly when defenses fail. Nabil Chehade, chief clinical transformation, innovation and strategy officer at The MetroHealth System, described a similar disruption just a week before the summit.

The outage was not caused by a cyberattack, but by a data-center temperature-control problem that unexpectedly shut down systems in the middle of the day. The 2024 ransomware attack on Change Healthcare by Russian ransomware group ALPHV BlackCat disrupted claims, prescriptions and insurance eligibility nationwide. The American Hospital Association said “every hospital in the country felt the impact, either directly or indirectly.” In its survey of nearly 1,000 hospitals, 74 percent reported impacts on patient care, 94 percent reported financial disruption and a third said more than half their revenue was affected.