Finger Lakes Health thanks the community, our patients, residents and their families for their patience and much appreciated understanding as we continue to bring systems back on-line following this incident.
Jose Acevedo, President and CEO shares “Our employees and medical staff are the heart of Finger Lakes Health. We are very grateful to and proud of our incredible employee and medical staff efforts to serve our patients, residents and community.”
Finger Lakes Health’s Information Services team has been working around the clock and is bringing systems back on-line in a step-wise approach. E-mail, internet, the majority of phone line access and several other electronic systems have been restored. We are continuing to use our downtime paper procedures, which we have in place and utilize for situations including weather emergencies, power outages or other situations in which we have limited electronic access. This underscores the reason that we regularly conduct “downtime” procedure drills which proved useful in our response preparedness.
We have final confirmation from our security experts that there was NO patient, resident, or employee data compromised. We have confirmation there was NO unauthorized acquisition of protected health information or personally identifiable information.
The recovery is due significantly to our prompt response upon initial notification of the incident. Our immediate action to reduce connectivity and bring our own systems off-line to protect them and patient/resident/employee care and information was effective and served an important purpose. The response process which we had in place worked to reduce the severity of the impact. Our experts have shared that this was a sophisticated attack that was only directed at extortion of money and not to access information.
We have kept the FBI apprised of our work and also related to the steps we have been taking including a decision to leverage our insurance carrier to make a payment which has accelerated our recovery. We made this decision in the interest of patient and resident care to minimize patient inconvenience and to move past this incident as quickly as possible.