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Timmins fracture clinic, chemotherapy patients impacted by HSN computer virus

CEO asks for people accessing hospital to be patient
2017-11-10 Timmins and District Hospital MH
Timmins and District Hospital. Maija Hoggett/TimminsToday

A computer virus at Health Sciences North (HSN) in Sudbury is impacting Timmins and District Hospital.

CAO Blaise MacNeil said the local system does not have the virus, but the hospital is being impacted by the network shutdown. That means services such as the fracture clinic and chemotherapy treatments have been postponed, and staff is manually recording patient records.

Timmins is one of 24 hospitals in the northeast that accesses the electronic medical record system, Meditech, hosted by HSN which has been put on downtown as a result of the virus. The electronic medical record system for cancer programs in 12 hospitals, Mosaiq, is on downtime. Ten hospitals have their medical imaging system on downtime. Four hospitals have had their email and servers for back office impacted. 

“We were able to island ourselves off and all our systems are secure, however, obviously we can’t participate and benefit from the network until we’re that assured all HSN systems are secure and then when their systems are secure," MacNeil said.

When the problem is resolved, he said the Timmins hospital will implement the same security measures as Sudbury.

Right now at TADH, MacNeil said elective work and diagnostic imaging (DI) have been affected, and the fracture clinic for this afternoon and Monday has been  cancelled.

Chemotherapy patients are also being impacted. 

MacNeil said "one of the key systems that we rely on is hosted at HSN and in consultation with the oncologists there, they felt it was better to cancel the chemo treatments today. We had hoped to restart them tomorrow, but it looks like we won’t be able to restart them tomorrow. We hope to restart them on Monday with some extended hours to try to catch up.”

Without access to the electronic records, staff has reverted back to paper processes as well.

"And paper processes are much slower than using electronic functionality, and some of our newer staff — this is completely new to them, so things are taking longer,” he said.

When the system is running again, the electronic records will be updated.

MacNeil is asking people going to the hospital to be patient.

“We’re asking for the patience of our public so that they understand that by all means if there’s a problem, present to the hospital as you normally would, but please bear with us as we work through this process,” he said.

Yesterday, HSN said there is no evidence suggesting the privacy of patient information had been breached as a result of the virus.

HSN began noticing problems with its computer system at 8 a.m. Tuesday. It is not yet known how the hospital’s IT systems became afflicted with the virus. 

– With files from Sudbury.com