Cedar County Memorial Hospital in El Dorado Springs, Missouri, shut down its IT networks Aug. 14 after a disruption left its electronic health record, patient portal and internet access unavailable.
The outage also disrupted diagnostic imaging. Hospital systems could not transmit images to radiologists, so the emergency department partially diverted trauma and critical patients who needed immediate advanced imaging. The emergency department otherwise remained open.
The disruption affected both the hospital and its Medical Mall Clinic. Patients were asked to bring paper orders and current medication lists while electronic systems were unavailable, and the hospital warned them to expect longer waits.
Staff documented care manually and continued providing emergency, inpatient, outpatient, surgical and imaging services under backup procedures, according to the hospital’s incident updates.
In a reply beneath its Aug. 23 Facebook update, the hospital said it had stopped accepting card payments during the outage and would resume them when it was safe to do so.
During the disruption, Cedar County Memorial treated 170 emergency patients, admitted 12 people, saw 303 clinic patients and 203 specialty-clinic patients, completed 15 surgical procedures and performed 286 radiology scans, the hospital said.
Most network and online systems returned within one week, but Meditech remained offline for two weeks while the hospital conducted a systematic review. The hospital restored Meditech, electronic orders and the patient portal Aug. 28, returned to routine operations and ended ambulance diversion. Staff still had to enter records maintained manually during the outage into the electronic system.
Cedar County Memorial Hospital is Cedar County’s only hospital, a 10-bed critical access facility with more than 130 employees in El Dorado Springs, about 60 miles northwest of Springfield.
The hospital said outside forensic experts were investigating with assistance from the FBI. It had not determined whether patient information was affected and said it would notify patients if the review found their information was involved.
A ransomware group calling itself Wallstreet published a page naming Cedar County Memorial Hospital on its data-leak site Aug. 28. The page showed the claim’s countdown at zero and provided access to a browsable dump of files that Wallstreet claimed came from the hospital. DysruptionHub reviewed the page but has not independently verified the files’ authenticity, scope or source.
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OzarksFirst reported that a patient filed a proposed class-action lawsuit Sept. 9 alleging ransomware and data theft. Separately, Mason & Perry LLP published a page describing the incident as a data breach and seeking potential claimants.
The hospital has not confirmed that the listed material is authentic, that information was stolen or that Wallstreet caused the disruption. Neither the group’s claim nor the lawsuit establishes those allegations as fact.
DysruptionHub requested comment from Cedar County Memorial Hospital and Mason & Perry LLP but did not receive a response from either before publication.
