The health care system that runs St. Vincent’s in Birmingham reports ‘outage’ from possible ‘cyber security incident’

The healthcare system that operates St. Vincent’s Birmingham and five other facilities in the Birmingham metro area reported Wednesday that they may have been the victim of a “cybersecurity incident” that caused “disruption to clinical operations.”

“On Wednesday, May 8, we detected unusual activity on certain technology network systems that we now believe is due to a cybersecurity event,” Ascension Health, which manages the six St. Vincent from Birmingham Metro – St. Vincent’s Birmingham, St. Vincent’s Blount, St. Vincent’s Chilton, St. Vincent’s East, St. Vincent’s St. Clair and St. Vincent’s One Nineteen.-, said in a statement. “At this time, we are continuing to investigate the situation. We responded immediately, initiated the investigation and activated our remediation efforts. Access to some systems has been disrupted as this process continues.”

“Our care teams are trained for these types of disruptions and have initiated procedures to ensure the delivery of patient care continues to be safe and as minimally impacted as possible,” the system continued. “There has been a disruption to clinical operations and we are continuing to assess the impact and duration of the disruption.”

Companies doing business with Ascension Health have been advised to temporarily suspend their “connection to the Ascension environment. We will inform our partners when it is appropriate to reconnect to our environment.”

Ascension Health said a “third-party expert,” Mandiant, was assigned to help with the investigation.

“Competent authorities” have been notified of the incident, the health system said.

“Together, we are working to fully investigate what information, if any, may have been affected by the situation,” Ascension Health said. “If we determine that any sensitive information has been affected, we will notify and support those individuals in accordance with all relevant legal and regulatory guidance.”