In May 2024 Ascension — one of the largest non-profit health systems in the United States, running around 140 hospitals — lost access to its electronic health record and its MyChart patient portal to a ransomware attack reported as Black Basta.
Some sites diverted ambulances. Clinical staff moved to paper charting and manual medication ordering. Access was restored on a rolling basis through late May and June, with full restoration targeted for 14 June.
Paper Charting Is Not The Same As No Charting
It works. Staff who trained before electronic records still know how, and departments keep downtime forms for exactly this.
What it loses is the thing the electronic record was bought for: the allergy flag that fires automatically, the interaction check, the result that appears in front of whoever needs it without being carried there. Every one of those becomes a person remembering, under load, for a month.
The Corpus Argues This Capability Is Wasting
The fallback theme holds that organisations which limit damage do so with manual procedures inherited from a pre-automation era, that nobody tracks that capability, and that every efficiency programme reduces it.
Ascension is the strongest case for it and the clearest warning about it at once. The fallback held for a month across 140 hospitals — and it held because enough staff had worked that way before, which is a resource with a retirement date.
Diversion Moves The Harm Rather Than Removing It
An ambulance diverted from one hospital arrives at another, further away, which was not resourced for it. The harm does not disappear at the point of diversion; it is distributed to patients and staff who were never part of the incident.
Nothing counts that. It produces no notification, no filing and no figure, which is the corpus’s standing complaint about availability harm and the reason 24-0604 matters as much as it does.
Compiled from contemporaneous reporting and company statements, listed below. Attribution to Black Basta is as reported. The clinical descriptions are the general consequences of electronic-record downtime, not findings about any individual patient or site. No count of diverted ambulances or delayed procedures has been seen by this desk. Corrections: corrections@forensicpost.com.
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- Ascension ransomware attack affects 5.6 million patientsHIPAA Journal
- Black Basta behind ransomware attack on AscensionHCI Innovation Group