WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — Tenet Health, which operates St. Mary's Medical Center and Good Samaritan Medical Center in West Palm Beach, said Tuesday that the company "experienced a cybersecurity incident last week."
The Dallas-based corporation's news release is the first admission of a cybersecurity threat that crippled telephone and computer systems at the West Palm Beach hospitals last week.
John Rodriguez, who was a patient at Good Samaritan Medical Center last week, told WPTV that he noticed something wasn't right and expressed concern that hospital staff "could screw up and give me the wrong medicine or something."
Sources told WPTV that paper charting was being used because of the outage.
Shelley Weiss Friedberg, a regional spokeswoman for Tenet, dismissed Rodriguez's concerns as "preposterous" and asked WPTV to remove the story.
Contact 5 learned Monday that emergency medical crews have redirected patients away from St. Mary's Medical Center, leading more patients and personnel to share their concerns about the quality of care.
Tenet said it "immediately suspended user access to impacted information technology applications, executed extensive cybersecurity protection protocols and quickly took steps to restrict further unauthorized activity."
"Efforts to restore impacted information technology operations continue to make important progress," the news release said.
Tenet said that, although there was "temporary disruption to a subset of acute care operations," the company's hospitals "remained operational and continued to deliver patient care safely and effectively, utilizing well-established back-up processes."
"At this time, critical applications have largely been restored and the subset of impacted facilities has begun to resume normal operations," the news release said.