A cyberattack on OneBlood, a leading blood supplier for over 250 hospitals in Florida, has led to a severe blood shortage throughout the state.
The hospitals in Florida began experiencing issues from the cyberattack on Monday. Several hospitals have had to cancel non-urgent surgeries to conserve blood.
OneBlood Senior Vice President of Corporate Communications and Public Relations Susan Forbes said Wednesday the not-for-profit blood center "have implemented manual processes and procedures to remain operational," Florida Politics reported.
"Manual processes take significantly longer to perform and impacts inventory availability. In an effort to further manage the blood supply we have asked the more than 250 hospitals we serve to activate their critical blood shortage protocols and to remain in that status for the time being."
Mary Mayhew, the president and CEO of the Florida Hospital Association, said OneBlood provided blood to 80% to 90% of Florida hospitals. While Mayhew said it was a Russian cyberattack, OneBlood has not confirmed this.
She added there was a serious shortage of platelets, impacting hospitals' ability to perform transplants, open-heart surgeries and cancer treatments. OneBlood is collaborating with federal, state and local agencies to address the situation. Due to these efforts, the hospitals were receiving about 60% of their usual blood supply.
OneBlood revealed they experienced a "ransomware event," severely limiting their ability to test and distribute blood, causing them to operate at much-reduced capacity.
"OneBlood takes the security of our network extremely seriously. Our team reacted quickly to assess our systems and began an investigation to confirm the full nature and scope of the event," Forbes said. "Our comprehensive response efforts are ongoing and we are working diligently to restore full functionality to our systems as expeditiously as possible."
Nationwide blood centers are sending blood and platelets to OneBlood. The AABB Disaster Task Force is coordinating national resources to help with additional blood products. Tampa General Hospital (TGH), a level 1 trauma center, stated they are conserving supplies when possible.
TGH is also working with state and federal leaders to ensure they have enough supplies to minimize the impact on their operations.
Meanwhile, Jackson Health System, a nonprofit academic medical system governed by the Public Health Trust, said it has procured additional units of blood from another supplier, and at this moment they have enough inventory to continue performing complex procedures such as organ transplants, trauma-related surgeries, heart surgeries and more.
"Because we do not know how long this outage will impact our supply chain, our clinical leadership is reviewing every planned surgical case requiring blood in order to ensure the limited supply is distributed appropriately, and putting processes in place to preserve this valuable resource," Lidia Amoretti, Jackson Health System's spokesperson added.
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