Montclair, Westwood Hospitals Divert Ambulances After Cyber Attack

MONTCLAIR, NJ — Two hospitals in North Jersey are diverting ambulances from their emergency rooms after a nationwide cyber attack, authorities confirmed Monday.

The attack impacted the computer systems at Mountainside Medical Center in Montclair and Pascack Valley Medical Center in Westwood, in addition to others across the nation.

A spokesperson for Hackensack Meridian Health, which runs both hospitals, released the following statement about the ongoing situation to Patch:

“We became aware of a network outage due to a potential security incident that is impacting Hackensack Meridian Mountainside Medical Center and Hackensack Meridian Pascack Valley Medical Center. There is no adverse impact on patient care. No other HMH hospitals are impacted, as they are hosted on a separate network. As we work to assess the impact of this outage and restore access, we are following established downtime protocols.”

The statement continued:

“As a precaution, our emergency rooms are currently on divert status. We continue to care for patients in both of our ERs, however, we have asked our local EMS systems to temporarily divert patients in need of emergency care to other area facilities while we address our system issues. This ensures critically ill patients have immediate access to the highest level of care as we work to bring our systems back online.”

RANSOMWARE ATTACK

Ardent Health Services, the parent company of Hackensack Meridian Health which owns and operates 30 hospitals in six states, also released information about the cyber attack on Monday.

According to a statement, Ardent Health Services and its affiliated entities became aware of an information technology cybersecurity incident on the morning of Nov. 23, which has since been determined to be a ransomware attack.

"The Ardent technology team immediately began working to understand the event, safeguard data, and regain functionality," spokespeople said. "As a result, Ardent proactively took its network offline, suspending all user access to its information technology applications, including corporate servers, Epic software, internet and clinical programs."

The statement continued:

"Ardent has reported this event to law enforcement and retained third-party forensic and threat intelligence advisors. In addition to electronic protection procedures already in place, Ardent has also implemented additional information technology security protocols and is working with specialist cybersecurity partners to restore its information technology operations and capabilities as quickly as possible. At this time, we cannot confirm the extent of any patient health or financial data that has been compromised."

"In the interim, while this incident results in temporary disruption to certain aspects of Ardent’s clinical and financial operations, patient care continues to be delivered safely and effectively in its hospitals, emergency rooms, and clinics," the company wrote.

"In an abundance of caution, our facilities are rescheduling some non-emergent, elective procedures and diverting some emergency room patients to other area hospitals until systems are back online," spokespeople said.

"The investigation and restoration of access to electronic medical records and other clinical systems is ongoing," the company added. "Ardent is still determining the full impact of this event and it is too soon to know how long this will take or what data may be involved in this incident."

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