McLaren Health Care’s cyberattack delays cancer patient’s treatments

By Darren Cunningham

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    PONTIAC, Michigan (WXYZ) — Like many patients at McLaren Health Care’s hospitals, Reginald Tidball said he’s waiting for a phone call letting him know when he can resume life-saving radiation treatments that have been put on hold by cybercriminals.

McLaren said cybercriminals attacked the system Monday morning.

“As you can well imagine, it kind of puts you in a panic. Is the cancer getting taken care? I’m pretty confident it is. But you always wonder,” Tidball said.

Tidball is fighting lung cancer. He’s a patient at McLaren Karmanos Cancer Institute in Flint and said he just completed chemotherapy. The 82-year-old is undergoing rounds of radiation that have been disrupted due to the cyberattack on McLaren’s computer network.

He said he got a phone call before an appointment Monday morning.

“(They) said don’t show up. We have a problem,” Tidball recalled. “And then that evening, they called again and said don’t come tomorrow and then next evening, they called again and said don’t come for the rest of the week.”

McLaren is just the latest health system successfully targeted by cybercriminals. Ascension suffered a cyberattack on May 8. As a result, delays for patients persisted.

Corewell Health notified patients on Dec. 22 of an attack. That affected 1 million patients.

In August of 2023, McLaren Health suffered a ransomware attack that impacted 2.5 million patients.

“With all the brains in this world today, you would think there’d be somebody that could write a program to prevent this. But then again, there’s hackers. They keep going, going, going. They’re smart too apparently,” Tidball said.

He said he has full faith and confidence in McLaren to get the situation resolved as quickly as possible, having been a patient for nearly a quarter century.

“I had prostate cancer 24 years ago. Got rid of it. In the last two years, I’ve had three new cancers: bladder, kidney and lung. We took care of the bladder. Two for two now,” he said.

Until the lung cancer treatments are able to be complete, Tidball said the kidney cancer treatment is delayed.

“Bottom line, there’s a lot of cancer around, but call me in a year and I’ll tell you I beat ‘em all,” he explained.

In a statement, McLaren said in part, “Our team will work diligently with any patient who has an appointment rescheduled.”

The full statement can be found on the company’s website.

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