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Published on Jul 19, 2024 • 2 minutes reading
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Bluewater Health’s clinical data for the recently ended fiscal year may be marked with an asterisk.
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The hospital, which was hit by a cyberattack last October, is still missing clinical data from the last eight months of its fiscal year, which runs from April 2023 through March 2024, said Marlene Kerwin, vice president of corporate services.
She said employees used paper files when systems went down after the cyberattack.
“We are now in the process of getting those (systems) up and running again,” she said.
Bluewater Health’s hospital information system (HIS) Meditech has recovered sufficiently to be effective again, the hospital’s CEO Paula Reaume-Zimmer said, as Bluewater Health prepares to upgrade its medical records system in November.
But because data from the intervening period is still missing, a solution is needed. “Reloading” paper documents months after the fact can be problematic, Kerwin said.
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“You basically create a manual diagram, which you then have to enter into the computer system,” she said.
“So if there’s a piece of information missing… if you do it in real time, you track it and you get answers to your questions and you know the data quality is good.”
Looking back eight months later, people are unlikely to remember the nuances and “we’re just concerned … that there might be some gaps in the data,” she said, noting that backloading would also be a big chore for already busy workers.
According to her, poor registration can have consequences for the financing of hospitals. The financing by the Ministry of Health is based on the costs per weighted case and other factors.
That’s why the ministry is considering using Bluewater Health’s 2022-2023 clinical data as a proxy, Kerwin said, noting that the data appears to be similar to 2023-2024, based on visits and other information.
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“It’s a better option to do that if they’re going to use the weighted case information to inform future funding, than to try to push information backward that could disadvantage us” because of missing aspects, she said.
It is not yet clear when the ministry will make a decision, she said.
“They were like, ‘Stay tuned.’”
She said that registration for the current year 2024-2025 will continue as usual.
“It’s a very unique situation that we’re in,” she said, adding: “I think we’re all looking forward to moving forward with our new HIS.”
Meanwhile, Bluewater Health has postponed its annual general meeting because the financial information only recently became available, Kerwin said.
The hospital group’s board recently agreed to hold the legally required meeting before the end of September. No date has been set, Kerwin said.
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“The audit started late and is now taking longer due to the downtime caused by our cyberattack and because we had to perform some manual processes,” she said.
“We hope that we can hold (the general meeting) sometime in August, but that has not been confirmed at this time.”
A global technical issue resulting from a cybersecurity software update caused delays in emergency departments, surgeries, chemotherapy, radiation and diagnostic imaging on Friday, Bluewater Health officials said in a news release, noting that the technical issue was not a cyberattack.
Patients whose appointments were cancelled were contacted directly, officials said in the press release, thanking people for their patience.
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