Patient records coming back online after cyberattack, but imaging backlog could take weeks to clear: Hospital

Electronic patient records at Windsor Regional Hospital will come back online next week on Wednesday, officials say.

But it'll be a while yet before the backlog on diagnostic imaging is cleared, after a cyberattack took systems offline in October. 

"Over the course of the next few days, we have a very detailed plan where each program will be entering their patients in a systematic way ... and be back to electronic charting," said Karen Riddell, the chief operating officer and chief nursing executive for the hospital, in an update to the hospital board Thursday. 

"Our professional staff are very excited about this and we're very much looking forward to getting back online."

But some applications that are integrated into the electronic health record will take longer to be online, she said.

For lab results that means one to two weeks, and for medication orders that could be one to two months, she said. 

Riddell also gave an overview of where the hospital is at with diagnostic imaging delays caused by the cyberattack. 

Ridell said there had been no delays at any point for the most urgent diagnostic images, known as P1 and P2 priority patients — patients that need imaging completed within 24 or 48 hours — and they are running at full capacity. 

For P3 patients — those who need imaging within 10 days — Riddell said they expect the backlog to be cleared in about 10 weeks. The backlog was created by the hospital's picturing archiving and communications (PAC) system being impacted during the attack. 

And for the least urgent patients, it could be 2024 before wait times after back to normal: That could happen in January for patients awaiting an MRI and February for people awaiting a CT scan and the hospital is not currently completing these images. 

"We have informed all physician offices early on in the Code Grey of the potential impact to wait times to make sure that any patients [whose] clinical condition was changing or there's a change in priority could either be expedited locally or redirected to other hospitals for imaging, or if they're appropriate to wait as some of the P4s would be," Riddell said. 

The cyberattack on Oct. 23 led to a system outage involving patient records, email and more at Windsor Regional Hospital, Erie Shores HealthCare, Hôtel-Dieu Grace Healthcare, Bluewater Health and Chatham-Kent Health Alliance. 

The personal information of millions of employees and patients was compromised in the attack. 

Neither the hospitals nor TransForm — the hospitals' IT and payroll administration organization, which is at the centre of the attack — paid ransom demanded by attackers. 

In her presentation to the board, Riddell showed an image with just some of the paper charts that now need to be entered into electronic health records in the coming days. 

"I'm sorry to Mother Earth. I'm pretty sure that we didn't help with the potential for global warming during this Code Grey," Ridell said.

"But I just want to give a shout out to all of the staff that have really worked night and day to get us through this and we're happy to see some sun on the horizon."