When ransomware attacks: Answering the call

In the early hours of Oct. 27, 2020, the Sky Lakes Medical Center support team discovered the hospital had been hit by a ransomware attack. “The ransomware took out every system in our hospital,” Gaede said. “We were 100 percent offline. All financial systems, clinical systems, our entire network.”

In total, 650 servers and 150 applications were down, so the team at Sky Lakes Medical Center quickly began strategizing about how to completely rebuild the network and get all systems online and working again.

System recovery began in earnest and was facilitated by backup software purchased a year earlier. “When we bought this backup product for efficiency, we didn’t know we were buying ransomware insurance,” Gaede said. “We had all of our data and backups that we could recover.”

The Sky Lakes Medical Center team prioritized restoring clinical systems, starting with the picture archiving and communication system (PACS). “We were really concerned about the safety of our patients,” Gaede said. “When your PACS is down completely, it makes it very difficult for patient care, and it is a huge potential impact for patient safety and continuity of patient care."

“Then we got this harebrained idea – we decided we wanted to go live with a fully integrated PACS,” Gaede said. After hearing how long it would take to get the former PACS up and running again, Gaede and team decided to switch to an entirely new vendor that committed to a much shorter timeframe.

“After we purchased Sectra’s PACS through Electromek Diagnostic Systems, then came restoring all of our systems for the hospital,” Gaede said. “3M’s reporting drives the radiology workflow, so we needed to get imaging up and running so we could take care of our patients and our community.” Because there was no time to waste, he called his 3M representative on a Saturday, and the team immediately jumped into action.

“This is where the relationship came in,” Gaede said. Close collaboration between 3M and Electromek enabled quick mobilization. “Literally, in just a few days, we sat down and white boarded with Sectra and 3M, and we built out all brand new interfaces,” Gaede said. “We had numerous meetings that went well into the night. 3M always made sure their team was available to work with our team. We had to design, build, test, document and validate it all before going live.”

Thanks to this collaboration, Sky Lakes Medical Center went live with a fully integrated system less than four weeks after ransomware hit the hospital. “To do it all on that timeline and those circumstances, that’s just the character of the people at 3M,” Gaede said. When Sky Lakes Medical Center originally implemented 3M Fluency for Imaging, the go-live plan took nine months. This time around, the 3M team got it done in 20 days.
 

“There are very few companies that would have stood up resources like 3M did. That level of commitment helped us bring the systems back online and go live in the time period that we did.”

– John Gaede, director of information systems, Sky Lakes Medical Center