Nearly two and a half months after a cybersecurity breach knocked down Palomar Health Medical Group’s computers, the health system on Thursday announced it’s made “significant strides” in restoring its systems to full functionality.
PHMG said on its website that medical records, phone and online patient portal systems, among others, have been restored. Some systems, however, are not back to full functionality.
During the outage, patients couldn't make appointments or refill their prescriptions online, and doctors could not access patient medical records.
PHMG said the breach happened between April 23 and May 5. Hackers gained access to patient names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, medical histories and health insurance information.
For Kenneth Rhodes, the news came too late. He's already transferred to another medical group.
The military veteran moved back to San Diego from Idaho in April, and Medicare assigned him a primary care doctor at PHMG. He said at his first visit on May 6, a day after the breach knocked down the computers, he was asked to fill out all of his paperwork manually, even though he had already filled it out online.
With the outage, he doesn't know if his information has been entered into the system.
“I have no confidence that I'm even in their system," Rhodes said. "I don't even know that if I call them today, even if that phone call went through without a problem if they'd even know who I am.”
Rhodes has a background in software support. He thought the computer issue would be fixed within two to three days, but he knew it was serious when the outage dragged on for several weeks.
"My first take on it was, 'So this looks like a ransomware attack,'" he said. "If you're locked up for this long, somebody's got a hold of your data, or, you know, got a lock on your data, and they're not going to release it until you pay up."
Palomar Health has yet to say what caused the outage other than a cybersecurity breach. The health system did not respond to emails seeking comments.
For Rhodes, the real problem came when he tried to get a referral to see a neurologist and cardiologist. He has Parkinson's disease.
"About two weeks after my appointment. I called and their phone system was very difficult to figure out how to get through to the right person and so I left a general — I think it was just in a general mailbox — left a voicemail message," he said. "And it was probably a week or so after that that I got a call from them. And it was a little bit concerning because it was like, 'Hey, we don't know when you came in, or who you saw, or what you need.'”
At that point, he went to the Department of Veterans Affairs to get the care he needed. He said he initially preferred going through Medicare because it was faster.
Medicare has now assigned him to a new medical group, but that won't take effect until Aug. 1.
