A network breach of One Brooklyn Health has affected patients and employees over the past few weeks at three hospitals in Brooklyn.  

“We severed connections to our electronic health record,” said Dr. Sandra Scott, executive director at Brookdale Hospital, is one of the three hospitals impacted by the breach. “We severed connection to the myriad of applications that we use to provide care.” 

Brookdale, as well as Interfaith Medical Center and Kingsbrook Jewish Medical Center, have been experiencing issues, such as prescriptions being written with communication issues among staff. 

“Staff is complaining because they’re working triple overtime,” said social justice activist Rev. Kevin McCall. 

News 12 spoke with cybersecurity expert Pete Nicoletti, who said that a likely cause for this breach was a phishing incident – an unsuspecting user from inside the One Brooklyn Health system likely clicked an unsafe link that led them to a webpage that could have installed something into their network.  

Nicoletti says that they likely downloaded something that allows the hacker(s) to receive hospital information, making it difficult for patients to protect their medical records.  

One Brooklyn Health says they’re working with the New York state Department of Health to fix the problem.

In a statement, they said: "Nothing is more important to us than the health and safety of our patients. Our hospitals and facilities are open, are we working toward reducing our reliance on downtime procedures by deploying additional technologies and reactivating aspects of our network."