Computer hack disrupts pay for Bradenton hospital workers. Company says recovery is near
One of the consequences of Sunday’s hacker attack on the Universal Health Services IT system is that it has disrupted pay for frontline health care workers in Manatee County.
That’s in addition to potentially interfering with patient care itself.
“Our pay is being affected. They paid us some money, but not all of it,” said one local UHS worker who asked to not be named. UHS operates Manatee Memorial Hospital and Lakewood Ranch Medical Center, in addition to other hospitals across the United States.
“We are working short-staffed and they only paid us about half of what we would normally receive,” the employee said.
In the interim, the employee said that workers are keeping their hours on paper.
Manatee Memorial and Lakewood Ranch are directing questions about the computer hack to corporate headquarters in King of Prussia, Pa.
Asked about the pay issue Friday, the corporate office responded: “Universal Health Services (UHS) completed its payroll processes on time this week. We have a large number of corporate level administrative systems as you might expect and the recovery process is either complete or well underway in a prioritized manner.”
Late Thursday, UHS offered an update on the status of its IT system:
“The UHS IT Network is in the process of being restored and applications are being reconnected. We have a large number of corporate-level administrative systems, and the recovery process is either complete or well underway in a prioritized manner. We are making steady progress and are confident that we will be able to get hospital networks restored and reconnected soon.
“Our major information systems such as the electronic medical record (EMR) were not directly impacted; we are focused on restoring connections to these systems. In the meantime, our facilities are using their established back-up processes including offline documentation methods,” the Thursday statement said.
The IT outage started early Sunday morning through a security issue triggered by malware.
Throughout the outage, UHS has said that it has no indication that any patient or employee data has been accessed, copied or misused.
UHS said that it has implemented extensive IT security protocols to protect its systems and data, and is working with IT security partners to restore IT infrastructure and business operations as quickly as possible. Friday, the company’s email system was coming back on line.
