Christopher A. Longhurst: Healthcare cyber attacks can impact mortality

Quoting Christopher A. Longhurst, Chief Medical Officer and Chief Digital Officer at UC San Diego Health, shared on X/Twitter:

“Healthcare cyber attacks can impact mortality. Survival with favorable neurologic outcome after an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) decreased from 40% to 4.5% during a regional ransomware cyberattack! A brief thread:

Why would OHCA survival rates drop during a regional cyberattack? ‘While speculative, EMS diversions may have contributed to worse outcomes for OHCAs by prolonging time to advanced resuscitation and post-arrest care.’

The ‘delay in care’ hypothesis is consistent with prior studies like this one which showed patients had longer ambulance transport times and higher 30-day mortality when hospitals were impacted by local marathons!

This work supports the conclusion of last year’s JAMA Network Open study which suggested that ransomware attacks should be treated as regional disasters.

Many thanks to my co-authors for this work! And very glad that the UC San Diego Health Center for Healthcare Cybersecurity is innovating new ways to prevent and mitigate these attacks.”

Read further.
Source: Christopher A. Longhurst/X

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