TMH Hospital Down due to a IT incident

Tallahassee Memorial HealthCare continues to struggle through operations in the wake of an IT security issue that occurred late Tuesday night.

Non-emergency procedures for Monday are canceled and the hospital said in a Sunday update that it expects to update patients about Tuesday procedures soon on its website.

IT security events take time to investigate and resolve. Our investigation is ongoing and, as is typical in such situations, we expect it will take some time to determine exactly what happened.

The IT security breach is a suspected ransomware attack, according to sources with knowledge of the situation.

“As a precautionary measure, we have taken our IT systems offline,” the memo read. “The good news is that our IT department quickly detected the issue and is working proactively to solve it.”

The hospital is following protocols for system downtime and is taking steps to minimize disruption. Downtime protocols call for the hospital to utilize paper documentation of patient information.

“We take our responsibility to ensure the security of our IT systems very seriously, and we prepare for events of this nature,” the memo continued. “As a result of this issue, we have rescheduled non-emergency patient appointments.”

The hospital also continues to divert some EMS patients and will only be accepting Level 1 traumas from its immediate service area. All non-emergency surgical and outpatient procedures have been canceled and rescheduled.

Tallahassee Memorial officials said more information would be provided as it becomes available.

Late Friday, the hospital provided the following update: TMH “continues to manage an IT security event that occurred late Thursday night. We continue to operate under our IT system downtime protocols, and we continue to provide care to our patients. We do not have further updates at this time but will continue to post on TMH.ORG as we have added information.”