The pc community system at a serious Brooklyn hospital community has been offline since Nov. 19 – leaving medical workers unable to entry affected person medical data or to add laboratory and take a look at outcomes to digital affected person portals, in line with docs and different folks conscious of the state of affairs.

The outage impacts One Brooklyn Health System, a consortium that contains Interfaith Medical Center, Brookdale Medical Center and Kingsbrook Jewish Medical Center. 

It is unclear what brought about the outage or whether or not sufferers’ private info, comparable to social safety numbers and addresses, are in danger.

In a press release to THE CITY, One Brooklyn chief government officer LaRay Brown didn’t clarify how the disruption started or how lengthy it’ll take to carry the system again on-line. 

“One Brooklyn Health (OBH) recently experienced an incident resulting in a network disruption. Immediately upon discovering the incident, we took certain systems offline to contain the disruption,” the assertion learn. “Our IT team is continuing to work diligently with the support of third-party advisors to ensure that our systems are brought back online as quickly and safely as possible, and in a way that prioritizes patient care.”

Jeffrey Hammond, a spokesperson for the state Department of Health, mentioned in a press release: “We are aware of the incident, and we are working with One Brooklyn Hospital Network to ensure patient safety.” He declined to remark additional.

Asked if the outage was on account of a ransomware assault or different malware, spokespersons for One Brooklyn and the state Department of Health declined to remark.

For nearly every week, docs and nurses have been unable to entry affected person medical data or outcomes on pc techniques. Instead, they’ve needed to write all the things down on pen and paper, and to view take a look at outcomes – comparable to CT scans and different photographs – instantly on testing machines, somewhat than accessing them by way of pc wherever within the hospital.

The community outages additionally imply docs can not fulfill prescriptions electronically, as required by a state law that went into effect in 2016, and should as an alternative name pharmacies instantly so as to take action, a time-consuming course of that has led to longer ready instances in the course of the busy flu season.

On Wednesday, an attending heart specialist at Interfaith described the state of affairs as “very hectic.”

“There is no network anymore over here,” the physician, who requested to not be named for concern of retribution, advised THE CITY. “There are no electronic medical records of any type and there is no network of any type. All computers, everything is down.”