Lurie Children's Hospital restores parts of communications network knocked offline by 'criminal threat'

Portions of Lurie Children’s Hospital’s network have been restored after the system was forced to shut down two weeks ago following a “criminal threat.”

Email to and from external e-mail addresses and a “majority” of the hospital’s phone lines have been restored, a spokesperson for the hospital said in a statement Wednesday.

But the call center established by the hospital after the incident, remains the best way for patient-families to reach providers because MyChart, a patient portal where families can book appointments and exchange messages with their providers, is still offline, the spokesperson said.

The call center can be reached at (800) 543-7362 for non-urgent patient questions, information about scheduled appointments and prescription refill requests. The hotline operates 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday and 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday. The hotline is closed Sunday.

There is still no clear time frame for total restoration of the hospital’s network.

“As an academic medical center, our systems are highly complex, and these incidents can take time to resolve,” the spokesperson said. “Our network systems’ restoration is ongoing and progressing.”

Experts have said it could take weeks or months for the hospital to fully recover depending on the severity of the attack, details of which have remained scant.

The “criminal threat” to its network forced Lurie to shut down its systems since Jan. 31. That included phones, email, electronic medical records and the MyChart patient portal.

“We did this in an effort to protect the information of our patients, workforce and organization at large,” Dr. Marcelo Malakooti, chief medical officer, said at a news conference at the hospital last week.

But hospital officials provided no specifics on the “known criminal threat actor” behind the communication breakdown.

Officials at the hospital at 225 E. Chicago Ave. were working with the FBI, other law enforcement and internal experts to resolve the issue. All Lurie Children’s locations have remained open during the outage.

Contributing: Phyllis Cha