Lurie Children's Hospital continues restoration efforts following January cyberattack

CHICAGO - Lurie Children's Hospital is still working to restore their systems following a cyberattack in January.

Six weeks later, families will soon have access to their patient portals again at Lurie Children's. However, hospital officials caution that the process of reactivating MyChart could take several days.

Due to the high volume of families accessing MyChart, officials also warn that service disruptions are possible. However, patient-families will be relieved to know that the following functions are coming back online: scheduling, e-check-in, provider messaging, and medication refill requests.

Amid the headaches caused by the outage, which officials say was caused by known criminal actors, parents and guardians have not had access to paying their bills online. That feature will be up and running again in the coming days.

In the meantime, Lurie Children's Hospital has extended their payment timeframe.

During attacks like this, cybersecurity expert Pete Nicoletti from Check Point says information has been compromised, and patient-families should be hyper-aware of suspicious activity on all of their accounts.

"Every single person that's ever been a patient there really needs to be looking at identity theft. They really need to be looking very carefully at their email. Because here's the thing, health care information is the most valuable information that hackers can steal. A lot of people that are not security conscious reuse their name and their password on every single website. So you got to stop doing that. You have to have a separate name and password for every website and use a password manager to manage that," said Nicoletti.

Hospital officials say they are also working to update patient portals with visit summaries and other information collected over the last several weeks when their system was down.