In a The Buffalo News article, HEALTHeLINK Executive Director Daniel Porreca highlighted the value of Western New York’s health information exchange (HIE) when the Eric County Medical Center was shut down due to a cybersecurity attack.
Fortunately, ECMC was already a HEALTHeLINK data source prior to the outage and had been uploading its patient care data to HEALTHeLINK for quite some time so other healthcare organizations could provide even better care of common patients. … While this cyberattack prevented ECMC staff from accessing its own electronic patient records directly, ECMC’s patient information was still readily available by connecting to HEALTHeLINK. HEALTHeLINK essentially proved to be ECMC’s backup system!
(Source: The Buffalo News)