On December 10^th 2019 Hackensack Meriden health, New Jersey’s largest hospital network, was attacked by hackers. The hackers seized control of vital computer systems, locked out applications, encrypted files, and brought the entire health network to its knees. Doctors and nurses couldn’t look up medical information to treat their patients, lab work couldn’t be completed, hundreds of surgeries had to be rescheduled, and everyone had to revert to a disorganized paper system to get things done. All of Hackensack Meriden’s facilities were affected; from small clinics to large acute care centers. They were forced to pay a ransom to the hackers to get full control of their systems again.

In analyzing the costs of the attack on Hackensack Meriden, one thing stands out as being particularly damaging. The attack caused 100s of surgeries to be delayed or canceled. Considering operating room time costs an average of $100 per minute, Hackensack Meriden likely host hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars. However, they had no choice but to cancel the surgeries because their computer systems were down. OR managers couldn’t request sets/items for procedures, they couldn’t see their schedules on their computers, and they had no way of tracking where things were at their facilities.

CaseTrak360 would not have been affected if it was active in the Hackensack Meriden network at the time of the attack. The attack crippled the network’s locally hosted systems and CaseTrak360 is hosted in the cloud on Amazon Web Services. CaseTrak360 would not have even been visible to the hackers because the only way to connect to it is from a web browser as a remote client. CaseTrak360 does not use or require any local hosting resources from the networks that connect to it. Hacking CaseTrak360 directly is also unlikely as hackers would first have to breach Amazon’s servers, which is nearly impossible. CaseTrak360 itself is encrypted via SSL using 256-bit keys on both the server and client devices.

If Hackensack Meriden utilized CaseTrak360 they would still have been able to request sets/items for procedures, track sets/items throughout their facilities, and they would have been able to schedule procedures inside of CaseTrak360. It would have reduced the number of procedures that needed to be delayed or canceled and would have scaled down Hackensack Meriden’s losses.