The All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS)-Delhi on Wednesday said that the hospital’s patient registrations and sample processing was stalled on Wednesday due to an error in the server and the problem may have been caused by a “ransomware attack”.
In a statement issued on Wednesday evening, the hospital administration said that as of 7.30pm the services were being handled manually.
“Today the server for the National Informatics Centre’s eHospital being used at AIIMS New Delhi was down due to which outpatient and inpatient digital hospital services including smart lab, billing, report generation, appointment system etc, have been affected. All these services are running on manual mode currently,” the statement said.
“The National Informatics Centre (NIC) team working at AIIMS has informed that this may be a ransomware attack which is being reported to and will be investigated by appropriate law enforcement authorities,” it added.
According to the doctors at AIIMS-Delhi, the hospital’s server has been down since 7am on Wednesday.
“The registration process is being handled manually, which is causing a delay and resulting in long queues. Patients who do not have a unique health ID are facing problems,” said a doctor at the hospital who did not wish to be named.
Many patients and their families took to social media, posting photos and videos of the chaos at AIIMS on Wednesday because of the server problems.
“Trying to book an appointment at AIIMS via their website since morning and the page constantly is flashing an error,” Medhavi Gupta tweeted.
Another user, Harry Gail tweeted, “…My brother has an OPD appointment on December 6, 2022. I am not able to cancel or reschedule appointment from the site…”
AIIMS has recently piloted an internal dashboard, ‘AIIMS main hospital casualty dashboard’, to display in realtime the emergency beds status and the number of patients waiting for admissions on those beds. Apart from this, the status of CT scans and MRIs will also be displayed. The hospital is trying to integrate this system with all aspects of functioning including appointment booking, monitoring the status of appointments, sample booking, collection etc.