Anatomy of a Cyberattack

Course overview

Our hospital was the victim of a massive cyberattack, which has been reported as one of the 5 most significant cyberattack events in the U.S. healthcare system in 2020 (Becker IT December 2020). The event resulted in a network-wide shutdown of all computer systems with some outages lasting over 40 days. This event had a significant impact on our institution and patient care, and crippled lab operations. Having just transitioned to EPIC/Beaker one year prior, we immediately lost all access to our health information management (HIM) system in Anatomic Pathology, paralyzing our ability to process and result specimens. With an HIM system outage of longer than 25 days, we focused on developing systems to help regain operations, establishing new manual workflows and paper reporting. With more laboratories transitioning to network HIM systems such as EPIC/Beaker, we are increasingly vulnerable to the threats of cyberattacks and prolonged downtimes. We would like to share our experiences and lessons learned to help others prepare for continued and increasing threats to cybersecurity.