The emergency department at Ascension Saint Agnes Hospital was accepting new patients as of 5 a.m. Wednesday following an overnight system reboot.
The Southwest Baltimore hospital needed to take some of its systems offline starting at 11 p.m. Tuesday to launch a restart following a cyberattack last week, said Maryland Institute for Emergency Medical Services Systems spokesperson Todd Abramovitz. Between 11 p.m. and 5 a.m. the hospital stopped accepting new emergency department patients.
The attack impacted operations at Ascension health centers across the country.
This overnight “mini disaster” status event, during which the emergency room would divert new patients to nearby hospitals, was the second since the May 8 attack. The first one lasted from the night of the attack until the following day.
“It’s still fluid. Certain systems are running fine. Certain systems we’re not sure of,” Saint Agnes spokesperson Justin Blome said. “We are still working through this cyberattack.”
There could be additional system restarts in the coming days, Blome said. The local facility is largely taking cues from its national counterparts with these restarts as they manage the impacts from the cyberattack.
The attack is part of a larger trend of cyber breaches targeting health care entities. In 2023, there were 809 cases of data violation in the health care field across the country, according to a January report from the Identity Theft Resource Center. That’s up from 343 cases the previous year.
Around 56 million people were affected by last year’s data breaches in heath care, which was the most affected market sector, beating out compromises of financial data and professional services data, according to the report.