NEW DELHI: It’s not business as usual at AIIMS yet, but the top hospital – which is reeling under the harsh impact of a major cyberattack – has been limping back to normalcy. The attack paralyzed the digital delivery of patient care facilities and services.
After a long 20 days of a shutdown induced by a ransomware attack, the smart lab at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) on Tuesday reestablished connection with the e-hospital software. The lab had remained non-functional following the ransomware attack.
Normal lab services on the hospital software, however, had started functioning partially as a few online reports were generated, along with manual ones. “The connectivity between the e-hospital and the laboratory information system (LIS) has been established but restored fully.
We are still generating paper reports,” a doctor from the lab medicine department said. Meanwhile, in a huge relief to patients, online appointments for the hospital’s Out Patient Department (OPD) have also been re-started which were stopped following the November 23 attack.
However, doctors said that e-hospital services are still not restored in many wards. Servers for the National Informatics Centre’s e-hospital being used at the AIIMS faced a cyberattack last month due to which outpatient and inpatient digital hospital services – including smart lab, billing, report generation, and appointment system – were affected. All these services were running in manual mode since then.
Following the incident, the Intelligence Fusion and Strategic Operations of Delhi Police registered an FIR under Section 385 of the Indian Penal Code (which refers to putting a person in fear of injury in order to commit extortion) and Section 66/66F of the IT Act, pertaining to cyber terrorism and computer-related offenses against unknown persons.