INDIANAPOLIS — Justin Neisser has been a nurse for 13 years.
"My mom is my inspiration for going into health care. She's a nurse as well for about 30 years," Neisser said.
Neisser, originally from Texas, has been a traveling nurse for the last three years, most recently working at Ascension St. Vincent in Indianapolis.
"I was working the day it happened," Neisser said, referring to May 8, when the hospital system was hit with a cyberattack.
Hackers disabled all systems.
"We couldn't print forms out. We didn't have medications records for patients. It was just a lot of confusion," Neisser said.
Three weeks later, concerns continue.
"There's still a lot of confusion — like a daily confusion," Neisser said.
According to Neisser, physicians must write onto medication records.
"Sometimes, they are reconciled wrong. Sometimes, patients may be getting wrong medications, or medications may be the wrong route. Maybe oral to IV. Could be the wrong dose," Neisser said.
Another concern is keeping accurate patient records after hospital stays and managing patient documents.
"If a patient has been in the hospital for more than three days, the charts we're getting is about a quarter-inch thick, so we can't keep all of the paper documents, so someone is assigned to thin out the charts and take older documents," Neisser said. "The issue is when these charts are thinned out, they're taking the physician orders with them, so now I have a handwritten medication record, but I have no way to reconcile if these are the correct medications because now I don't have physical copies of the orders."
Neisser said nurses are catching a lot of mistakes.
"Sometimes, it's hard to tell if a medication has already been given. You don't know and you don't want to double dose anyone, or if a medication was held or if it was discontinued. You really have no way to reconcile this with the physician's orders," Neisser said.
These are things Neisser said leads to a stressful environment for many nurses.
"A lot of nurses are scared because you don't want to accidentally harm a patient by giving them medication that was already given. It's just very stressful," Neisser said.
A spokesperson at Ascension St. Vincent responded to 13News about Neisser's concerns in an email:
"Patient safety continues to be our utmost priority. Our dedicated doctors, nurses, and care teams are demonstrating incredible thoughtfulness and resilience as we use manual and paper-based systems during the ongoing disruption to normal systems. We appreciate our community's patience and understanding."
Neisser said while he has a background of working without electronic access in hospitals, some of the newer nurses don't.
"The policies that were set in place I think were a little outdated, and there wasn't really anyone to train people on the downtime process," Neisser said. "You kind of had to learn as you go, which also made quite a bit of delays, and then, I think that's when a lot of errors were happening as well because no one knew what to do."
An Ascension spokesperson also shared this statement with 13News regarding the cyberattack:
"Ascension continues to work around the clock with industry-leading cybersecurity experts to safely restore systems across our network. Please know our hospitals and facilities remain open and are providing safe care. Patients should continue to monitor the regional updates portion of this webpage for the latest information on a state-by-state basis.
Restoring Electronic Health Record (EHR) access has been among the top priorities of our recovery process. Due to the hard work of our teams over the past several days, we have successfully restored EHR access in our first market and are actively progressing a plan to restore access across our network on a rolling basis.
We want to sincerely thank our patients and community for your support and to our dedicated clinicians who continue to provide quality care."