Wednesday, April 1
The city’s fire brigade can once more drive up to Charité’s campus in Wedding – Berlin’s largest rescue station – which it could not do yesterday between 5:10 p.m. and late in the evening. The university hospital announced yesterday, “After a defect in a Charité data center, there have been technical malfunctions in the IT system on all three bed-leading campuses since noon.”
Charité’s hospitals in Mitte and Steglitz were also affected by the outage. Despite the issues, patient care remained stable, however, they stated, “Nevertheless, we have deregistered the central emergency rooms for safety reasons, so that they are not controlled by the fire brigade.” The hospital ruled out the possibility of a cyber-attack, claiming no evidence of a targeted intention.
This is important to distinguish considering that hackers have invaded IT networks of German hospitals in recent years. They have blocked patient databases before in order to blackmail clinics, that they would only lift the hostage of digital health records after receiving a ransom. They have also been known to trade patient information on the black market.
Charité is Europe’s largest university hospital with four main locations, 3,300 beds and, including subsidiaries, around 24,000 employees. It spends more than 2.5 billion euros per year, including money from health insurance companies, state subsidies and third-party funding for research.
