The Sudbury hospital continues to battle a virus in its medical records system.

It began Wednesday at Health Sciences North and is still causing headaches, delays, and cancellations of some services, not only in Sudbury, but across the region.

CTV News learned today that HSN is not alone.

Another 24 hospitals in the region have been impacted, 21 of which have seen their main electronic medical record system put on downtime.

At first, the concern was that this may have been a co-ordinated attack, but the ripple effect is a result of HSN shutting down its records system, Meditech, which is used by the entire regional network of healthcare centres.

"Those systems were not infected, but as precautionary measure, we shut them down. And that meant that those systems were not only unavailable to Health Sciences North, but they were also unavailable to the other 24 hospitals. We have no indication that a privacy breach has occurred. What we have seen is some direct impacts on the oncology care at the cancer centre. We've been unable to provide radiation and chemotherapy treatments, so we've had to cancel those yesterday and today. We rely very heavily upon our information systems. So, that has led to significant delays in our emergency department. We have asked people again to look at other alternatives, where appropriate, for non-urgent care, such as walk-in clinics and Telehealth." said Mark Hartman, of HSN.

Other disruptions at hospitals across the northeast include:

  • Cancer program electronic medical records at 12 hospitals
  • Medical imaging system at 10 hospitals
  • Email and back office services at four hospitals

About 75% of HSN's systems are impacted by the downtime.

Many people are wondering what's causing all of this?

Right now, HSN is only confirming a computer virus called a zero day virus has infected it's systems, but CTV News has been told by hospital sources that this was a deliberate cyber-attack.

HSN says that's not clear.

A zero day virus is one that has no previous patches or solutions.

They have a cyber security firm on the ground working on it, but there's more clarity on just how the hospital’s computers got sick.

Officials say they hope to start bringing critical systems back online Friday and are rescheduling cancer treatments for this weekend.