The server of the National Informatics Centre's (NIC) eHospital used at AIIMS, New Delhi crashed around 7 AM and was down till the filing of this report late in the evening, affecting the healthcare centre's outpatient department (OPD) and sample collection services.
“All these services are running on manual mode at present,” AIIMS authorities said.
A team from the NIC working at AIIMS has informed that this may be a ransomware attack, which is being reported and will be investigated by appropriate law enforcement authorities, AIIMS said in a statement.
"With the server being down, the outpatient and inpatient digital hospital services, including smart lab, billing, report generation and appointment system, among others have been affected," an AIIMS official said The OPD and sample collection were handled manually but the sample collection system for those who do not have a Unique Health Identification were affected, another official said.
As each sample collected requires a barcode for tracking, the server going down has led to very few samples being collected, he added.
Measures are being taken to restore the digital services and support is being sought from the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) and NIC, AIIMS said in the statement.