AnMed said a malware-related cybersecurity disruption knocked out phone and internet service at all of its hospital locations on Monday, July 27, forcing the health system to juggle emergency care, service closures and patient transfers at the same time.
Care teams stayed on site and continued to see patients in the emergency room, but the outage changed how the system could move people through its network. An official with Medshore said patients were being diverted from AnMed to hospitals in Greenville, underscoring how quickly a communications failure can ripple beyond one building and into the wider care system.
The hospital system said it was working to return its systems to full functionality as quickly as possible, with help from third-party cybersecurity specialists and state and federal authorities. It also said decisions on procedures, patient transfers, diversions and other operations were being made with patient safety as the guiding principle.
That left a split schedule across the system. AnMed Medical Group offices and AnMed Imaging Services were scheduled to be closed Monday, July 27, while AnMed Urgent Care locations, AnMed Kids Care, AnMed Integrated Therapy locations and AnMed Laboratory Services were scheduled to open as planned. Patients with elective procedures scheduled for that day were to be contacted directly by staff with more information.
The friction was easy to see in the experience of patients moving through the outage. A recently released patient said they were not able to get any paperwork or anything when discharged, and said MyCharts were down. That is the practical cost of a network problem that reaches beyond phones and into the basic handoff between hospital and patient.
AnMed has not said when the disruption began or when its systems will be fully restored, and that is the question now hanging over the health system: how long it can keep emergency care moving while the rest of its network comes back online.
