El Dorado Springs, Mo.-based Cedar County Memorial Hospital is working with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and external forensic experts to investigate an August IT disruption that left its Meditech EHR offline for two weeks.
The hospital voluntarily shut down its IT networks Aug. 14 after experiencing the disruption, according to a Sept. 10 update. Its network and most online systems were restored within a week, but the Meditech system remained offline while the hospital conducted what it called a systematic review.
The EHR was restored Aug. 28.
Cedar County Memorial said the investigation remains ongoing and it has limited information to share about the cause of the disruption. The hospital has not said whether patient information was affected.
If the investigation determines that patient information was affected, the hospital said it will notify those patients directly in accordance with federal requirements.
The hospital had activated downtime procedures after the Aug. 14 disruption. During part of the outage, its emergency department was placed on partial diversion because medical imaging systems could not transmit files to radiologists.
Cedar County Memorial returned to routine operations Aug. 28, when its EHR and patient portal were back online and the hospital ended ambulance diversion.
