Lurie Children’s Hospital, the biggest children’s hospital in the Chicago area, has laid off “a very small” number of employees after conducting a budget review, it announced last week.
“We are identifying and acting upon opportunities to increase operating efficiency and support our longer-term growth,” Julianne Bardele, communications director for Lurie, said in a statement. “This exercise resulted in a very small reduction in team members across the organization.”
The Streeterville hospital gave no further details about the number of jobs or type of positions that were cut. It also didn’t share whether severance packages were offered to laid-off employees.
“We take seriously the impact these decisions have on the impacted team members and are committed to treating them with respect and compassion,” the hospital said. “At the same time, we are confident these are the right decisions for our organization’s future.”
The job cuts come as Lurie faces federal lawsuits that were recently filed over a cybersecurity attack that shut down the medical center’s systems earlier this year.
At least two complaints seeking class-action status were filed with the U.S. District Court in Chicago. The lawsuits allege the hospital waited too long to tell patients that their data had been compromised.
The complaints also said the criminal ransomware group Rhysida claimed it stole the data and sold it for 60 bitcoins, or about $3.4 million.
Cybercriminals attacked Lurie’s systems in January and gained access to about 800,000 patients’ personal and medical information, Lurie reported in a data breach notice on its website. The compromised data included names, addresses, dates of birth, contact information, Social Security numbers, health insurance details, medical conditions, diagnoses and treatments.
The attack shut down the hospital’s systems for months. Emails and phone lines were restored by mid-February. Its patient portal MyChart and the hospital’s electronic medical records platform Epic went back online in March. But the hospital said it wasn’t until May that it was no longer dealing with an active cybersecurity threat.