SAN DIEGO (KGTV) — Amid the coronavirus pandemic, Scripps Health is now dealing with a cyberattack that has left many of its systems still down as of Monday morning.
Scripps Health says their emergency departments, outpatient urgent care centers, and Scripps HealthExpress locations are open for patient care, but the cyberattack has left the entire hospital system still dealing with major outages.
In fact, if you go to any of the hospital system's websites to book a vaccine appointment, for instance, or try to access MyScripps, the online patient portal, the websites simply don't come up.
In a series of tweets on Sunday, Scripps Health called it an "information technology security incident." They said while many patient appointments would have to be rescheduled, they insisted patient care was being "delivered safely and effectively" at their facilities:
"Scripps Health experienced an information technology security incident detected late on May 1, 2021. As a result of this, we suspended user access to our information technology applications related to operations at our health care facilities, including MyScripps and [Scripps.org].
While our information technology applications are offline, patient care continues to be delivered safely and effectively at our facilities, utilizing established back-up processes, including offline documentation methods.
Our outpatient urgent care centers and Scripps HealthExpress locations and Emergency Departments remain open for patient care.
Some patient appointments scheduled for today and Monday, May 3, will need to be postponed as a result of this. We are working on how best to notify these patients about the need to reschedule.
We want to reassure our patients that our physicians and employees are well-trained and thoroughly prepared to respond to this sort of situation so that we can continue to care for the community’s health care needs.
Our technical teams and vendor partners are working around the clock to resolve these issues as quickly as possible. We have notified law enforcement and the appropriate governmental organizations."
Scripps Health did not have any new updates Monday, however, leaving many to fear that sensitive patient health information, or PII, may have been compromised across these systems. Scripps has yet to offer more information on any other aspects of this hack. The hospital system told ABC 10News when they had more information, they would share it.
Several sources have told ABC 10News that other hospitals stepped in to take patients from Scripps hospitals over the weekend.
According to county public health officials and Scripps Health, the Del Mar Fairgrounds vaccination superstation, which is run by Scripps, is up and running normally through the state's MyTurn system, which is entirely separate from Scripps Health.
