Anatomy of a Cyberattack Part 2 Managing a Clinical Pathology Laboratory During 25 Days of Downtime

The authors described how their academic health care facility experienced a cyber attack which “led to a complete shutdown of major patient care, operational and communication systems” and the electronic health record, lab information, pharmacy, scheduling, billing, coding, and other systems. While these were incapacitated, the lab facilitated operations with manual interventions for specimen testing, hired additional staff, and used different communication modalities for patient care to mitigate the effects of the unplanned downtime.