Mass. hospital hit by cyberattack

Early Monday, Brockton Hospital did what hospitals try very hard not to do: it started turning ambulances away. Inside, staff dropped back to paper records after a cybersecurity incident knocked parts of Signature Healthcare’s network offline. By the end of the day, the disruption had spread from the emergency department to cancer care, pharmacies, and the patient portal that many people use to check records and appointments. (boston25news.com, govinfosecurity.com) Signature Healthcare said it detected “suspicious activity” in part of its network on April 6 and activated its incident-response plan. That usually means something blunt and necessary: disconnect affected systems before the problem spreads. At Brockton Hospital, the result was immediate. Electronic health records went offline, internet service was disrupted, and clinicians began documenting care with pens, paper charts, and manual workarounds. (ems1.com, boston25news.com) Some parts of the hospital kept moving. Signature Healthcare said inpatient care and walk-in emergency services remained open, and surgeries and procedures, including endoscopy, were still going forward. But the places where timing and coordination matter most began to buckle. Ambulances were diverted to other hospitals. Chemotherapy infusion appointments for Tuesday were canceled, with patients told to call the Greene Cancer Center to reschedule. Retail pharmacies in Brockton and East Bridgewater were closed or unable to fill prescriptions, depending on the stage of the outage and the report. (enterprisenews.com, masslive.com, govinfosecurity.com) That mix of open doors and broken systems is what a hospital cyberattack often looks like in real life. The building is still there. Doctors and nurses are still there. But the quiet machinery that routes patients, verifies medications, pulls up allergies, checks prior notes, and sends prescriptions has stalled. “Downtime procedures” is the calm phrase for this. In practice, it means slower triage, more phone calls, handwritten orders, delayed appointments, and a much heavier burden on staff memory and cross-checks. (boston.com, ems1.com) Brockton Hospital is a 216-bed community hospital about 35 miles south of Boston, part of a regional system that includes more than 150 physicians across 15 care locations. That scale helps explain why a network problem does not stay neatly inside one room or one department. A patient who cannot access the portal may also have trouble confirming a medication refill. A closed pharmacy can turn a technical outage into a treatment interruption by nightfall. (govinfosecurity.com, signature-healthcare.org) As of April 7, Signature Healthcare had not publicly said whether the incident was ransomware, though a spokesperson told MassLive the organization had identified the nature of the event and notified law enforcement. It also said there was, so far, no indication that data had been compromised. For patients in Brockton, the visible fact was simpler than the forensic one: the screens went dark, the ambulances went elsewhere, and nurses went back to paper less than two years after the hospital had reopened from an 18-month shutdown caused by a 2023 electrical fire. (ems1.com, whdh.com, govinfosecurity.com)