For days, patients have been unable to get their medical records, talk to their doctors, receive life-altering diagnoses or know when important health procedures would continue at the hospital system.
Kettering Health administrators said the cyberattack that caused the ongoing system-wide technology outage was a ransomware, though they said they did not have any direct contact with the perpetrator and did not pay any ransom.
“Tuesday, May 20th at 5 a.m., we did experience an unauthorized access to our system. As soon as this was realized, we did shut down our IT infrastructure, which essentially means we shut off our door to the world,” said John Weimer, senior vice president and leader for Incident Command at Kettering Health, said.
“We went on downtime processes, which our teams train for. We both train internally, and we train with our community partners for downtimes,” Weimer said. “The teams have continued to deliver remarkable care, even though this event was extremely jarring for them. We didn’t expect to be down for this period of time.”
Organizations that have experienced this type of unauthorized access are typically down for 10 to 20 days, Weimer said, citing industry experts.
“We are working to be on the lower end of that scale,” Weimer said.
It has not gone unnoticed that this cyberattack and technology outage is happening at the same time as the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, but Weimer said they could not confirm if that was the perpetrator’s goal or just a coincidence.
“Right now, our priority has been to get our infrastructure back up,” Weimer said.
Kettering Health’s teams have been working around the clock to restore access, he said.
“We understand that this has been extremely frustrating for our patients, our families and our community partners. And we have appreciated the grace that they have given us and continued to have worked with us along with our clinical teams,” Weimer said.
Even though Kettering Health has prepared for events like this, the length and the scale has been larger than expected, Weimer said.
“So as we work to bring our systems back online, we will be doing that over the next several days.
Kettering Health will be getting its systems back online over the next several days, he said. On Thursday, the hospital system was able to restore the ability for its clinical teams to talk to each other.
On Friday, Kettering Health was able to set up a temporary number for patients to call if they have urgent health questions. That phone number is (937) 600-6879.
“I cannot under value or under appreciate the grace that our clinical teams are working under, as well as the grace that patients and families, as well as a lot of our community partners, have given us as we work to get it back up to a normal state,” Weimer said.
Medical staff at Kettering Health tell the Dayton Daily News that physicians’ ability to fill prescriptions and do medical imaging is severely limited, they have no access to patients’ medical records, and some diagnoses and treatments are suspended. They say doctors are giving out their personal cell phone numbers to patients because phone lines are down.
Kettering Health has 14 area medical centers and more than 120 outpatient locations throughout Western Ohio, as well as Kettering Physician Network, which includes more than 700 board-certified providers.
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