Allscripts is still attempting to get all services back to normal after its Raleigh and Charlotte data centers fell victim to a ransomware attack late Thursday night. While waiting for the electronic health record vendor to straighten the situation out, customers are experiencing outages.
“Ransomware attack on Allscripts has taken down our e-prescribing, EPCS and some other services,” Yvette Crabtree, MD, a Kansas CIty-based physicians affiliated with Sunflower Medical Group said. “At least we don’t use their hosted application. I hear many hosted practices couldn’t access their EMR yesterday.”
[Also: Allscripts hit by ransomware, knocking some services offline]
After learning about the attack from Allscripts on Thursday, Northwell Health in New York took the precautionary measure of disconnecting from Allscripts data centers, according to a Northwell spokesperson.
“Northwell moved quickly to avoid the potential for complications and Allscripts does not believe any data from its system was removed,” the spokesperson said. “The electronic prescribing of controlled substances was the only electronic medical record that was unavailable to providers at Northwell Health’s facilities – we have 23 hospitals and about 660 ambulatory locations. Northwell resumed normal operations over the weekend.”
So far, there’s no update on the Allscripts’ website or social media accounts about the outage -- or how long it’s expected to get all sites back online.
The company hasn’t commented on how many providers were impacted by the outage either, but Allscripts supports over 180,000 physicians, 100,000 electronic prescribing physicians and about 40,000 in-home clinicians.
In the meantime, Crabtree said the in addition to the EPCS being down for three days, making eprescribing iffy, services that relied on Allscripts data center were also down.
“We still had our EMR because we have our own server,” she added. “From what I can tell we were lucky. It’s the clients that have cloud hosted services who were really screwed."
Twitter: @JessieFDavis
Email the writer: jessica.davis@himssmedia.com