Patients continue to be turned away due to Ascension’s cyberattack

Ascension Health is still dealing with a cyberattack as of Thursday afternoon.

The system shutdown impacts Ascension systems across the country, causing appointment delays and impacting patient services.

TMJ4’s Mariam Mackar tracks the second day of the data breach and says patients are still being turned away. Mariam has received reports of canceled appointments.

Viewers have contacted TMJ4 to say they missed CT scans and mammograms and were unable to pick up prescriptions.

The breach has disrupted telephone and computer access for healthcare facilities and forced healthcare professionals to only handwrite patient notes.

“It looks very much like a ransomware attack and the impact of this is known. “In some cases, companies are able to shut down their systems to prevent the bad guys from breaking into the systems before something bad happens,” says Alex Holden, a cybersecurity expert. TMJ4 said on the first day of the outage. “But sometimes it’s too late.”

There is no information yet on whether personal patient information was compromised as a result of the cyberattack or how long the system will be down.

Mariam will provide an update on the outage at 5:00 p.m

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