Omni Family Health reports ‘attempted cybersecurity incident’

A potential cyberattack against Omni Family Health led to a service outage for at least five days, leading customers and patients unable to refill prescriptions, manage appointments and access private health care information.

Dr. Asarulislam Syed, a psychiatrist at Omni Family Health, confirmed with The Californian on Thursday that the patient portal had been down since Monday and could have affected thousands of patients.

Syed said he reached out after being inundated with phone calls from clients complaining that they were unable to log into their online patient portal.

“I have at at least 5,000 patients that could have been affected,” Syed said.

A day after The Californian inquired, a spokesperson with Omni Family Health confirmed in a statement Friday that the site had been taken down due to “an attempted cybersecurity incident.”

“In response to the attempted incident, we immediately disabled internal systems, including our electronic health record and patient portal, to safeguard our data,” wrote spokesperson Michelle Lyday.

While the outage came as a hindrance to some, Lyday said there was no breach of data.

“Fortunately, due to Omni’s robust security measures and our swift response, the incident was successfully addressed and no Protected Health Information (PHI) or Personally Identifiable Information (PII) of either patients or staff was compromised,” Lyday wrote.

“Omni Family Health staff have been working diligently alongside cybersecurity experts to resolve this temporary disruption.”

Lyday did not say when the electronic medical record system would go back online.

Omni Family Health encompasses 40 health centers throughout Kern, Kings, Tulare and Fresno counties that provide medical, dental and behavioral health services to nearly 150,000 patients.