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By Beth Stibal |

Tenet Health confirms cyber outage after patients expressed “preposterous” concerns

hospital doctor medical emergency ORGAN TRANSPLANT
(AP Photo/Molly Riley)

Tenet Health is now confirming, via a press release, that the Dallas-based company “experienced a cybersecurity incident last week”  which affected St. Mary’s and Good Samaritan medical centers in West Palm Beach.  The admission confirms concerns expressed by patients to WPTV about potential malpractice which Tenet labeled “preposterous.”

Tenet is one of the largest hospital care service providers in the U.S. with over 146 hospitals.

As a result of the network outages, Tenet’s St. Mary’s Medical Center in West Palm Beach is diverting patients to nearby hospitals. Doctors and nurses were reduced to “charting” patient information by hand.

The outages are persistent and the press release claims that Tenet is making “important progress on its “efforts to restore impacted IT operations.” The incident initially caused a temporary disruption to a “subset of acute care operations,” but the remaining hospitals have remained operational amid the outages.

Tenet also stated it “immediately suspended user access to impacted information technology applications, executed extensive cybersecurity protection protocols and quickly took steps to restrict further unauthorized activity.”
Tenet representatives ended their update by saying “At this time, critical applications have largely been restored and the subset of impacted facilities has begun to resume normal operations.”
The notice does not reveal the cause of the cybersecurity incident, nor the day the outages began. But several local news outlets reported information and phone system disruptions at two of Tenet Health’s Florida hospitals (St. Mary’s and Good Sam) on April 20.
850WFTL staff writer Aaron Kahan contributed to this story.