Alberta Health Services outage highlights vulnerabilities: experts

The province was impacted by a network outage that crippled hospitals on Monday, and security experts weigh in on the long-term impacts and vulnerability in the healthcare system.

Alberta Health Services (AHS) says a third-party review is currently underway to determine the root cause of the outage that heavily impacted Alberta hospitals.

On Monday, it postponed some elective, non-urgent surgeries as a precaution, and it says that patients are being contacted for rebookings.

AHS says there’s “no indication that the technical outage was caused by hacking or any form of cyber-attack.”

But according to Dr. Tom Keenan, a professor at the University of Calgary, either way, a lack of preparation by AHS is problematic.

“If there wasn’t hackers, then it would have to be something else. Like maybe bad preparation. Airlines have multiple computers. So, if your pilot doesn’t see a display, there’s another computer that takes over,” Keenan explained.

“It appears that AHS didn’t have enough redundancy to take over yesterday. And that’s actually a problem because if you’re in the middle of an operation, you don’t want to hear that the network is down.”

According to cyber expert Terry Cutler, the CEO of Cyology Labs, it’s common for organizations to wait until something goes wrong before implementing a default system.

“It often comes down to budget,” Cutler told CityNews.

“If we don’t have the money to spend on this. This is never going to happen to us that’s one of the key comments we always hear. But until it happens, nothing is going to really change.”

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The outage lasted for a day, but Keenan says the impacts of the outage are a much bigger issue.

“So, the thing to worry about is that if this happens in the future, and you are the patient that’s on the operating table in the MRI or whatever, at that point, your care may suffer,” Keenan said.

“We have at the Foothills Hospital and intraoperative MRI machine. I guarantee you; it needs to talk to other computers and lab computers and so on. Once you break that chain, they don’t work the way they’re supposed to.”

Dr. John Cowell, AHS’s official administrator, said in a statement released late Monday that it’s important to understand what happened “so that it does not happen again.”

-With files from The Canadian Press