In the wake of a debilitating cyberattack against one of the nation’s largest health care systems, Marvin Ruckle, a nurse at an Ascension hospital in Wichita, Kansas, said he had a frightening experience: He nearly gave a baby “the wrong dose of narcotic” because of confusing paperwork. This story also ran on . It can be .
If you’re a patient or worker at an Ascension hospital and would like to tell KFF Health News about your experiences, to share your story with us. Ruckle, who has worked in the neonatal intensive care unit at Ascension Via Christi St. Joseph for two decades, said it was “hard to decipher which was the correct dose” on the medication record.
He’d “never seen that happen,” he said, “when we were on the computer system” before the cyberattack. A May 8 ransomware attack against Ascension, a Catholic health system with 140 hospitals in at least 10 states, locked providers out of systems that track and coordinate nearly every aspect of patient care. They include its systems for electronic health records, some phones, and ones “utilized to order certain tests, procedures and medications,” the company said in a May 9 statement.
More than a dozen doctors and nurses who work for the sprawling health system told Michigan Public and KFF Health News that patient care at its hospitals across the nation was compromised in the fallout of the cyberattack over the past several weeks. Clinicians working for hospitals in three states described harrowi.