Rural Hospitals Especially Vulnerable to Ransomware Attacks

August 30, 2024
Dennis Thompson HealthDay Reporter

Rural hospitals – and their patients -- are particularly vulnerable to the aftershocks caused by ransomware attacks, a new study reports.

“Ransomware attacks are bad news for hospitals and patients no matter where they happen, but they’re especially harmful to rural hospitals and patients,” lead researcher Hannah Neprash, an associate professor at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health, said in a news release.

Overall, ransomware attacks have more than doubled in the past five years, researchers said.

These attacks are more likely to occur in urban areas, they noted.

For example, in May a cyberattack disrupted operations at Ascension, a major St. Louis-based health care system with 140 hospitals in 19 states.

That attack followed a May ransomware assault on a subsidiary of health care giant UnitedHealth Group that disrupted billing at pharmacies nationwide and compromised the personal data of up to a third of Americans. The company wound up forking over $22 million to the cybercriminals.

But an attack on rural hospitals can have more pronounced effects, as those facilities are often financially vulnerable and serve older, poorer patients with worse health, researchers noted.

For the study, researchers gathered data on 43 rural hospitals and 117 urban hospitals that experienced ransomware attacks between 2016 and 2021.

They found that visits decreased for both urban and rural hospitals during the first week of such an attack.

However, rural patients had to travel farther to the nearest hospital not affected by the ransomware attack – more than 30 minutes, compared to under 10 minutes for urban patients.

Rural hospitals experiencing a ransomware attack were smaller and less likely to be part of a large health system, researchers added.

The study shows that to prepare for such attacks, rural hospitals need to reach out to other nearby health facilities and plan in advance.

“Preparing for cyberattacks is really a coordination challenge since it would likely require cooperation across hospitals that usually compete with each other in order to ensure everyone gets safe and effective care,” Nepresh said.

The findings were recently published in the Journal of Rural Health.

More information

The Association of American Medical Colleges has more on ransomware attacks.

SOURCE: University of Minnesota, news release, Aug. 28, 2024

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