Lurie Children’s Hospital has restored its electronic medical records platform after being down for over a month because of a cybersecurity threat, the hospital announced Monday evening.
MyChart remains offline, the platform patients use to communicate with providers, access medical records and test results and make appointments, according to a statement on the hospital’s website.
The hospital took its phone, email and electronic systems offline Jan. 31 because of a “criminal threat” from a “known criminal threat actor,” Lurie said in February. It has not explained what the threat was and how it affected its systems. The hospital has remained open and providing care.
Emails to and from external addresses and most of the hospital’s phone lines were restored last month. But the hospital’s electronic medical records platform, Epic’s MyChart, remains down.
Shortly after taking its systems offline, the hospital opened a call center, though some parents told the Chicago Sun-Times it was difficult to get help through the phone line.
The call center can be reached at 800-543-7362 for nonurgent 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.
“As an academic medical center, our systems are highly complex, and as a result, the restoration process takes time. Working closely with our internal and external experts, we are following a careful process as we work toward full restoration of our systems, which includes verifying and testing each system before we bring them back online,” the website statement reads.