With phone, email and other communications at Ann and Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago out for the eighth straight day due to “cybersecurity matters,” parents complained Wednesday about not being able to reach the hospital’s call center.
“It’s like putting information into a black hole,” said Debora Land, whose 18-year-old daughter has been a patient of the hospital since she was 2.
Lurie Children’s hospital established a call center Friday after all phone, email and electronic systems were taken offline Jan. 31 as part of the hospital’s cyberattack protocols. The hospital was still taking new patients, and previously scheduled appointments were being kept, the hospital said in a statement Monday.
Land, whose daughter had an appointment for blood work, said she reached out to the call center Sunday morning and was told she would receive a call back. Her daughter’s blood work is needed for an appointment she has with a specialist, which was booked six months ago, Land said.
When she didn’t hear back, Land wrote a letter to her daughter’s doctor and walked it to the hospital. She wasn’t allowed to leave the letter with the doctor’s receptionist, and was instead directed to the call center, where she was told her call would be marked as urgent, Land said.
She has yet to hear back.
“I’m angry, I feel neglected,” Land said. “And if they would just go public and say, ‘Guys, we’re overwhelmed, unless your kid is dying, don’t call us for three weeks,’ I’d be disappointed, but I’d do other things rather than keep trying to achieve the goal of getting bloodwork done for my kid before her specialist appointment next week.”
Land said that in the time her daughter has been going to Lurie, she hasn’t seen an outage that has lasted a week. Though Land said the hospital’s patient care is great, she questioned the cybersecurity and crisis communication at Lurie.
“They rolled out the call center like it was something great, and in my experience, it is not great,” she said.
Reposting for better readability and with the addition of the Spanish language version.
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The call center can be reached at (800) 543-7362, for non-urgent patient questions, information about scheduled appointments and prescription refill requests, a representative told the Sun-Times on Monday. The hotline operates 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Friday; 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday; and 8 a.m. to noon Sunday.
When the call center is closed, the main operator can be reached at (312) 227-4000, though the hospital noted it was receiving a high number of calls.
In a statement, the FBI said, “FBI Chicago is aware of the recent cybersecurity incident affecting Lurie Children’s Hospital and is utilizing all available investigative tools and resources to provide assistance. As always, our attention remains on ensuring the safety of our citizens and our nation’s critical infrastructure. There is no additional information available for release at this time.”
For Jason Castillo, whose 7-month-old daughter was waiting for anesthesia Jan. 31 when her heart surgery was called off, things are looking up. Castillo and his wife called the call center a number of times, sometimes having to leave voicemails, he said via Facebook Messenger.
On Tuesday evening, Castillo’s wife called him and said she had been contacted by Lurie. His daughter’s heart surgery is scheduled for Thursday. As far as the process for medical care, he said it’s “been basically the same as before,” though the hospital may have to redo tests because digital records are inaccessible.
Castillo is relieved that his daughter’s surgery is scheduled, but he expressed frustration about the way the hospital has handled patient care since the network outage.
“Feeling like we were in the dark to what was happening was definitely the most frustrating part of all this,” he said.
