Day 9 of AIIMS server outage: OPD treatments crawl at 10% of capacity

Earlier, doctors were able to attend to 30,000-35,000 patients a day across the hospital’s departments, a number that has plummetted to just 2,000-3,000 since the ransomware attack on November 23.

New Delhi: Daily patient treatments at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences have dipped to just 10% of the usual daily footfall since the premier government hospital’s servers were hit by ransomware nine days ago, showed data from the health care facility’s administration.

On Thursday, several AIIMS doctors confirmed that to speed up the process of bringing their digital services back up, MBBS students and junior doctors were assigned the task of installing antivirus software on all computers in the main hospital and in its centres. (HT Archive)

Earlier, doctors were able to attend to 30,000-35,000 patients a day across the hospital’s departments, a number that has plummetted to just 2,000-3,000 since the ransomware attack on November 23.

A senior AIIMS doctor who is also involved in the hospital’s administration said that while the footfall continues to be high, the number of patients doctors are able to attend to in the outpatient department (OPD) has dipped primarily because the entire process is now being handled manually.

“Before the attack, if a doctor was seeing 50 patients, they are now able to see only 20 patients. But we expect to revive our systems soon and will be able to go back to our original OPD capacity,” said the doctor, who asked not to be named.

On the morning of November 23, the systems at AIIMS and its centres were corrupted by the cyber attack, which wiped outpatient and research data from its primary and backup servers.

The Delhi Police’s Intelligence Fusion and Strategic Operations (IFSO) cell filed an FIR invoking sections of cyber terrorism against unknown people, even as teams from the National Informatics Centre and Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) have been attempting to restore the network.

The hospital in its last statement, on Wednesday, assured that the servers are expected to be back soon, though services at the facility continue to crawl, thanks to the lack of any online operations.

On Thursday, several doctors also confirmed that to speed up the process of bringing their digital services back up, MBBS students and junior doctors were assigned the task of installing antivirus software on all computers in the main hospital and in its centres.