Ransomware cyberattack on AIIMS server
NEW DELHI: India’s premiere healthcare institute —All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), Delhi reported a massive cyberattack on its server on Wednesday. All patient care services from appointments to registration and admission to discharge, billing, and report generation, were badly hit since 7 AM.
The ransomware comes close on the heels of AIIMS announcing paperless from January 1, 2023, and complete digitalisation of all hospital services from April, 2023.
A team of National Informatics Centre (NIC) working at AIIMS are reporting the “ransomware” attack for investigations by appropriate law enforcement authorities. Officials said that measures are being taken to restore the digital services and support is being sought from Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) and NIC.
AIIMS authorities confirmed that the server for National Informatics Centre’s eHospital being used at AIIMS, New Delhi was down due to which outpatient and inpatient digital hospital services including, smart lab, billing, report generation, appointment system etc., have been affected. All these services are running on manual mode currently.
Officials claimed that AIIMS and NIC will take due precaution to prevent such attacks in future. The hospital services were being run on manual mode till the filing of this report.
Several hospital staff tweeted after the server stopped working and patients were standing in queues and complaining about the delay. Some of them tweeted that they were not able to generate barcode to send samples, and were not able to see imaging reports. A hospital staff claimed that the work which was just a click away took more time as everything was being done manually.
“All basic details of the patients are being written manually. In fact reports and being sent manually, which takes a lot of time,” said a hospital staff, adding that it was a chaos in the institute on Wednesday.