MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — West Virginia University Hospital is assuring patients that no private information was compromised during what officials are characterizing as a “major computer problem” Tuesday morning at Ruby Memorial Hospital.
The issues with information technology systems throughout WVU Hospital and the outpatient centers started about 12:30 a.m. Tuesday, affecting some clinical and security operations.
“There was a cascade of issues and it just went throughout the institution and around 2:30 this morning one of our administrators said this is pretty serious and this is something we need to address. That’s when we alerted out incident command,” explained WVU Hospital Spokesperson Amy Johns.
Incident command is typically alerted for mass casualties and disasters. Hospital leadership came together to get a handle on the situation and get systems back up and running. Computers and applications run by computers throughout the hospital malfunctioned causing various problems. In some instances entire machines were not working in others some hospital files were inaccessible.
The computer issue also cause security cameras to go offline, prompting the hospital to go on lockdown for about four hours. The lockdown was lifted at 8 a.m.
IT staff believes the issue was either caused by a virus or malware and this was not an attempt to steal personal data.
“Patient information and employee information has not been compromised,” assured Johns. “This is not an attempt to steal data. There is no indication that any data has left the building. It just appears that it was malware or a virus.”
Ruby Memorial Hospital is operating normally, however, paitients may notice some delays at the outpaitent centers while IT staff continue addressing issues.
Johns said IT staff are going to floor to floor assessing which computers were compromised and systems continue to gradually come back on line.