• Posted by: Eng. Donya Bino
• February 13, 2026

Healthcare Cyber Attacks: Real Patient Safety Risks

When hospitals or medical schools get hit by ransomware or other cyber attacks, it’s not just an IT headache , it becomes a direct threat to patient safety and student care. Systems go dark, doctors lose access to records, medications get delayed, and emergency teams have to scramble with paper charts they haven’t touched in years. In schools and universities, the impact hits campus clinics and training programs: student health services slow down, future clinicians miss critical practice time, and research that could lead to new treatments stalls.

The worst part is how predictable it’s become. Attackers know these organizations can’t simply shut down or “wait it out.” The pressure to restore everything quickly is huge, and that rush sometimes leads to mistakes that hurt real people.

What Actually Happens During These Outages
1. Electronic health records disappear → no instant view of allergies, current medications, lab results, or surgical history.
2. Pharmacy systems lock up → delays in getting insulin, antibiotics, blood thinners, pain meds, or chemotherapy.
3. Monitors, infusion pumps, ventilators, dialysis machines, or imaging equipment become unreliable or unusable.
4. Because emergency departments are slowing down waiting times will be longer for patients requiring stroke medication; heart attack care; trauma/accident care.
5. When staff resort to using paper processes and they become under stress, tired, and not familiar with procedures will create a rise in error rates.

In terms of harm being caused to others in an education setting we have:
1. Campus health clinics who can't access a student’s medical record will have delayed care/can’t treat someone who has a severe asthma attack, has a serious allergy, has overdosed or needs something answered regarding a mental health emergency.
2. Medical and nursing labs that are not functioning will not allow students to practice lifesaving procedures such as intubating someone; drawing blood through IV; using crash cart.
3. Research databases that freeze, will cause Clinical Trials to pause and inability to follow up with patients and stop progress on developing new drugs.

Real Examples That Show the Human Impact
1. Change Healthcare ransomware (February 2024, effects continued well into 2025) This major U.S. billing and claims platform got taken down. Thousands of hospitals, clinics, and pharmacies couldn’t process prescriptions or prior authorizations. Patients waited weeks for insulin pumps, pain pumps, radiation therapy, and specialty drugs. Several deaths were later tied to those delays , quiet tragedies that rarely make headlines.

2. The Ascension Health network is made up of over 140 hospitals and was completely offline for approximately two weeks in May 2024. ERs had to redirect ambulances from their hospitals to other facilities, elective surgeries were delayed, and lab/radiology results took many hours instead of minutes to be completed. During this time, staff worked 24-hour shifts on a paper documentation system, and the percentage of patients who experienced a medication error or who did not have sepsis alerts noted in their medical record had a significant increase during this time period due to the outage.

3. In June 2024, Synnovis labs that serve many NHS hospitals in London were subject to a ransomware attack that caused blood testing services to stop functioning. As a consequence, blood transfusions were delayed (resulting in some deaths), several cancer surgeries were canceled, and critical diagnosis would not be available for weeks. Thus, clinicians made very high-stakes clinical decisions while not having current data from the lab that provided the needed diagnostic information.

4. Because of manual processes being used throughout 140 CommonSpirit Health organizations from 2022–2023, clinicians have documented that patients have had increased delays in the time to treatment for stroke, and that patients have had increased mortality related to undiagnosed sepsis or cancer from patients not being treated by clinicians in the appropriate timeframe.

5. In multiple cases during 2025, medical schools and campus health centers were subject to ransomware attacks. These attacks caused the ability to operate lab simulations and maintain student health records to be taken down.

6. Medical schools and campus health centers (multiple cases in 2025) Ransomware locked simulation labs and student health records. Nursing and medical students couldn’t train on ventilators or emergency procedures; campus clinics delayed care for student overdoses, severe asthma, and mental health crises.

These incidents aren’t “IT problems” anymore, they’re patient safety events and clinical risks. The line between manageable downtime and preventable harm can be measured in hours.

What actually makes a difference:
1. Offline backups that are tested regularly (not just sitting on a shelf).
2. Paper protocols and manual workflows that staff practice so they’re not starting from zero under pressure.
3. Fast detection so attackers can’t spread for days before anyone notices.
4. Network segmentation so one compromised server doesn’t take down the entire EHR, pharmacy, or lab system.
5. Serious vetting of third-party vendors:  billing platforms, pathology services, and EHR providers are single points of failure.

Cyber attacks in healthcare and medical education have moved beyond financial loss or data breaches. When the screens go black, people suffer, sometimes permanently. That’s the part that needs to stay front and center.