St. Agnes Hospital in southwest Baltimore was forced to limit services on Thursday due to a suspected cybersecurity attack.

The incident prompted the hospital to declare a “mini disaster” on Wednesday, meaning the emergency department should not receive any new patients. While around 25% of emergency room visits were from EMS crews transporting patients, the majority were walk-in visits.

“The hospital requested that we divert EMS traffic away from them to other nearby hospitals,” explained Dr. Ted Delbridge, executive director of the Maryland Institute for Emergency Medical Services Systems.

In a statement, Ascension, which operates St. Agnes, said: “At this time, we continue to investigate the situation. We responded immediately, initiated our investigation and activated our remediation efforts. Access to some systems have been interrupted as this process continues.”

Delbridge noted that the hospital’s IT challenges over the past 24 hours have forced a return to paper-based processes, requiring staff to be retrained and leading to inefficiencies.

“Their information technology challenges over the past 24 hours have made them have to resort to paper processes, so getting people schooled up to do things the way they used to do them is taking them some time and is making the hospital a bit more inefficient than they typically are,” Delbridge stated.

While St. Agnes says it will not turn away any patients, hospital officials are encouraging people to seek out other emergency departments for the time being if possible.

“If I had knowledge of their challenges right now and had a choice to go someplace else, I would choose to go someplace else,” Delbridge advised. “If I had a compelling reason to go to St. Agnes or it’s a true emergency and that’s the closest place, I would go there in a heartbeat.”