LDHC Part of 24 Hospitals afflicted with IT Challenges -UPDATE 8:09

Jan 22, 2019 @ 08:09

As of January 22nd  and moving forward Diagnostic Imaging and the Laboratory will be open for usual outpatient services.

an 18, 2019 @ 16:32

LDHC CEO Kadean Ogilvie-Pinter advised this evening that “Much progress has been made towards the restoration of our IT infrastructure. We are working through this initial restoration period and so the Diagnostic and Laboratory Services will remain closed for outpatients on January 21st, 2019. I will provide an update on Monday on when we will resume the usual hours of operation.”

Jan 18, 2019 @ 07:32

The Lady Dunn Health Centre (LDHC) remains open and there is no disruption to the Emergency Department Services at this time. Diagnostic Imaging and the Laboratory are closed to Outpatients at this time.

The LDHC joins the 24 Northeastern hospitals who have been afflicted by a zero day virus.

Thursday morning, January 17th, Health Sciences North (HSN) had reported that staff had worked through the night to plan full recovery of services following the discovery of the virus.

A 0-Day virus is one that is previously unknown to the software designers, and zero refers to the first day of that they become aware of it, and will now fix and issue a patch for all software owners to install.

The LDHC as the others have had all systems shutdown in order to contain the virus. One of these is the main electronic medical record system, Meditech. It was explained to Wawa-news by LDHC CEO Kadean Ogilvie-Pinter that the LDHC has curtailed use of email and other systems. It was advised that if you have an appointment for any of the outpatient services that you call and reschedule those appointments. The LDHC is unable to access those appointment schedules as part of the precautionary measures.

As part of the measures to protect patient information within the network of hospitals, it has been reported that the following systems were also put on downtime:

• Mosaiq (electronic medical record system for cancer programs) in 12 hospitals
• Medical Imaging in 10 hospitals
• Email & Servers in 4 hospitals

The website for the Lady Dunn Health Centre and Sault Area Hospitals is also down at this time.

Thursday morning, Health Sciences North (HSN) reported that staff had worked through the night to plan full recovery of services following the discovery of an IT virus. President and CEO, Health Sciences North, Dominic Giroux said, “We have no evidence to suggest that privacy of patient information has been breached. HSN is working to begin restoring critical systems by tomorrow (Friday) and planning to re-schedule cancelled chemotherapy and radiation treatments this weekend.”

LDHC CEO Kadean Ogilvie-Pinter explained, “We apologize for any inconvenience that the service level changes may cause. We will update the public when the Diagnostic and Laboratory Services are back to the usual hours of operation.”

Patients with questions or concerns are asked to call the Client Representative at 705-856-2335, ext 3217.