The Juan F. Luis Hospital’s electronic systems were crippled by a cyberattack on April 26 that forced the facility into nearly five months of manual operations and prompted a complete overhaul of its technology. Speaking at a recent “Conversations on Care: Community Dialogue” town hall, CEO Darlene A. Baptiste disclosed the severe financial impact of the breach, estimating a loss of $750,000 to $800,000 a week in readily accessible funds due to the inability to submit electronic bills. The hospital staff was forced to revert entirely to a paper-based system for months, causing major cash flow delays and placing an unprecedented strain on staff morale and operational energy. The CEO stated that while the money isn’t “lost,” it has been unavailable in real-time, resulting in a heavy economic toll on the organization.
The attack, which struck at 10:23 a.m. on the day of the breach, required an immediate and total system lockdown. Ms. Baptiste explained that the attackers gained entry by exploiting a critical, overlooked vulnerability in the hospital’s local servers—an issue she metaphorically described as an unprotected “doggy door” while all other defenses were secure. The threat agents infiltrated a single drive within the network, but the CEO confirmed that despite the access, no personal data belonging to patients or staff was compromised during the incident. Following the breach, the hospital’s IT team, in collaboration with federal partners and outside cybersecurity experts, performed a painstaking, terminal-by-terminal sweep of the entire system, and the federal investigation into the incident is currently ongoing.
The recovery process meant that all services and records reverted to manual, paper-based “downtime procedures” from April 26 until September. In what was described as a “heavy lift” for all staff, including nurses and physicians, employees had to quickly adjust to working without the familiar electronic system. Ms. Baptiste praised the workforce for their resilience, noting that dedicated crews worked around the clock in four different shifts, using up to 15 computer terminals 24/7 to manually enter and register patient information, effectively keeping the organization afloat during the crisis. The gradual return to digital operations began in September, with the hospital making a “cutover” to a new cloud-based system.
As part of the modernization effort, the hospital made the costly decision to completely rebuild its IT infrastructure rather than attempt a simple repair. This involved significant investment in cloud security, redundancy, and a safety operations center for continuous, real-time threat monitoring. Ms. Baptiste stressed that the new system offers “backups to the backup to the backup,” providing constant oversight and resilience that the old local servers lacked. While acknowledging the expense, the CEO called the overhaul essential, stating, “It is a pricey endeavor, but we have learned our lesson, literally, the hard way,” and affirming that they “cannot afford to go down this road again.”
Today, the hospital is slowly coming back online, grouped by specialty, with 80 to 85 percent of staff having regained access to the Meditech electronic health record (EHR) system, while the restoration of financial services is still underway. Ms. Baptiste summarized the experience as a painful but ultimately transformative one. She concluded that the attack served as a critical wake-up call, underscoring both the importance of robust cybersecurity and the sheer resilience of the hospital’s workforce, noting, “We’ve come out of it stronger.
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