A hospital in Illinois will close on Friday due in part to a cyberattack – a rare case of a health care provider publicly linking a hack incident to its closure.
The 2021 cyberattack on St. Margaret’s Health, a hospital in Spring Valley, Illinois, hobbled computer systems for months and prevented it from filing insurance claims, Linda Burt, a hospital vice president, told CNN on Monday.
“It took months after we went back online to catch up with billing,” Burt said in an email. Other factors in the hospital’s closure were staffing costs brought on by the coronavirus pandemic and supply chain and inflation issues, she said.
The hospital’s closure is “really disheartening” said Laurie, a switchboard operator at St. Margaret’s Health who declined to give her last name. “You get to know people. You get to know the patients,” Laurie told CNN, adding that there are many elderly people in the area who rely on St. Margaret’s for treatment.
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