Nearly three weeks after suffering an alleged cyberattack and shutting down its computer network, Palomar Health Medical Group continues to operate without fully functional systems, and patients report experiencing longer wait times for everything from scheduled appointments to renewal of prescriptions.
Although its hospitals in Escondido and Poway were not affected, Palomar said the attack affected its outpatient care facilities, including Graybill Medical Practices which joined Palomar Health Medical Group in 2019. Palomar did not shared no new details about the cause of the attack, nor its expected timeline. full resumption of operations, with its website still displaying a message acknowledging the attack and its consequences, published shortly after discovering the situation on May 5.
A Palomar Health official said this week that no update on the situation was available.
In the weeks since, many Palomar patients have shared their experiences on social media, particularly on Facebook, with some saying that previously simple activities, such as doing lab work and filling prescriptions, now require collect and deliver the documents in person.
“If you need lab work done and you don’t have physical documentation from your doctor telling them what to do, they will turn you away,” one poster on Facebook said. “It’s no big deal to me at this point, because I can’t get a doctor’s appointment anyway (until) their computers turn back on.”
For some, the situation has created uncertainty about upcoming scheduled medical procedures.
Eric Goldy of Valley Center said he has a minor heart procedure on the surgical schedule next month, but making all the pre-surgical visits without his caregivers having access to his complete electronic record has been a real chore, arriving for x-rays. , doctor visits, and lab work in offices that seem to suffer from a kind of institutional amnesia.
“Every time I’m there, I explain to them why I’m there, what it’s for,” he said. “On this last occasion, the nurse said bluntly, ‘we’ll do it, but it may not do you any good because the files are not currently uploaded to any system that allows anyone to see you.’ I had this done.
Maybe it’s because he works with his wife running a pet grooming business that puts him in the calming presence of dogs and cats every day, but Goldy’s voice doesn’t have a tinge of anger when he talks about the health care inconveniences he has. recently experienced.
For the most part, he said, his appointments were kept even though he had to re-explain why he was being treated when caregivers weren’t able to quickly look up his information. Others, he added, have not been so lucky, as he observed during a recent visit.
“I was sitting there, and a bunch of other patients were checking in and they were being told they had no record of why they were there,” Goldy said. “It was kind of a disaster.”
So far, Goldy said he still plans to continue his procedure next week if Palomar is able to do the job.
“I’m just hoping that if things are sorted out in a week or two, maybe they can upload those visits into the system and everything will be fine,” he said. “It doesn’t look promising, but I don’t want to waste all that money.”
That said, he adds, he has no personal animosity toward the Palomar workers, from secretaries to nurses, whom he met during this ordeal. All, he said, are clearly working very hard to keep the system running in difficult and frustrating circumstances. As a former dispatcher for a concrete and asphalt company, he knows what it’s like to be in the center of frustration.
“I always try to be nice to them, even though it’s annoying, and they tell me they don’t have my appointment and I have to reschedule it,” he said. “It won’t do any good to yell at them.
“You know, I know what it’s like to be in a position where you get yelled at for something that’s out of your control.”
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