“We greatly appreciate everyone’s patience during this process,” – Tim McDermott, CRMC Chief Information Officer
Cookeville Regional Medical Center’s (CRMC) Information System (IS) recently began experiencing some unusual activity, which created a technical outage Sunday, July 13, 2025 that disrupted some of CRMC’s computer systems.
While the investigation is ongoing and will take some time, this appears to be a ransomware attack. Cookeville Regional notified federal law enforcement and engaged external security experts to assist us with the investigation and recovery.
Since discovering the issue, the IS security team has been working around the clock to restore the affected systems and services.
“We greatly appreciate everyone’s patience during this process,” said Tim McDermott, CRMC Chief Information Officer. “The IS security team has been here 24 hours a day, working. We take this matter seriously, and we are working with outside IT experts to investigate the issue. This investigation is ongoing. At this time, we suspect that the outage was the result of a ransomware attack on our medical center. As we learn more information from our investigation, we will provide our patients with additional information as appropriate.”
The privacy and security of every patient’s information is one of CRMC’s top priorities. If the investigation determines that any information has been accessed or acquired without authorization, CRMC will notify those affected as soon as possible in accordance with applicable law.
“There are many questions all of us would like to know the answers to, and those will be answered in time we do believe,” said Buffy Key, CRMC CEO. “Right now, I can share that our staff have been phenomenal in working to care for our patients. Patient care has not been affected by this outage, even though technology, scheduling, etc. have been slow because of the event. Our team has stayed grounded in making sure we see patients and care for them. That is always the priority.”
Image by DC Studio on Freepik.
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