"There are places that, nothing. Others, with a long delay. The situation is erratic and all prescription validations on Wednesday, May 10 were lost." You can tell that María Isabel Reinoso is a patient woman, but she sounds hopeless. She heads the Buenos Aires College of Pharmacists, is pro-secretary of the Argentine Pharmaceutical Confederation (COFA) and, in addition, has a pharmacy. First-hand he knows that this noon, as for almost a week, dispensing medicines with prescription discounts is chaos, beyond the fact that Bizland and Farmalink, the companies involved in that computer management, have reported that they overcame the extortion cyberattack that left them inoperative on Thursday, and that the system, at the close of these lines, was slowly being rehabilitated.
Reinoso spoke with Clarín on Wednesday, but had also done so on Tuesday. He then listed his concerns. The first, that the system is not restored that day, as promised by the responsible company. Happened. However, this afternoon, some pharmacies saw little by little the return to life of Farmalink.
The second concern was that, once the situation was normalized, pharmacists would have to spend hours, perhaps days, carrying prescriptions for remedies that they were forced to dispense without being able to validate them. Validate that the person has the coverage quota up to date, validate the percentage of discount that touches him ... They had to do what they call "manual" or "offline" selling.
The tedious work predicted by Reinoso will come true. In a long and bureaucratic task, pharmacists will have to load and validate thousands of overdue prescriptions. Miles means "around 1,100,000," Reinoso estimated, knowing he could fall short.
The third concern touches on a topic that on Tuesday was only hypothetical: "What if the recipes loaded in the days before the cyberattack were lost?" Happened.
There are recipes that were lost and only realized now. Photo: Mario Quinteros
It began to circulate in the early hours of this Wednesday: some provincial pharmacies notified him by chat that Farmalink had revived. However, the validations of May 10, a day before the Lockbit ransomware attack, were missing. Reinoso asked the pharmacist at his own location to take a look. It was like that.
"It's a problem. The person took the medication and I validated it. But who pays me? We are going to have to make a bureaucratic exceptionality or I do not know how we are going to characterize it, "he lamented.
Bizland, Imed and Farmalink
Withdrawals, bonuses, copayments, authorizations, validations... All the paperwork and the computer part of the ungovernable pharmaceutical and health world is tedious for citizens. You want the medicine, you want to be cured and that's it. But it's worth understanding. At least, know who the protagonists are. Being companies of great power, conflicts like this generate great rumblings in everyone's lives.
Bizland and Farmalink, the names that circulated these days, are not the same. Bizland is responsible for a couple of important developments. One is redBus, the prepaid transport ticket system used in four provinces: La Rioja, Salta, Tucumán and Córdoba. Due to the extortion cyberattack they suffered, thousands of citizens of those provinces had difficulty loading their travel cards, although on Tuesday the system had already recovered.
Its other important development is Imed, a supplier platform of Farmalink, a network created by some of the local chambers of pharmaceutical laboratories, which today conveys the discounts of at least 100 social works of the nearly 250 in the country.
The cyberattack suffered by Bizland consisted of massive data encryption, which left the Imed platform inactive and, therefore, Farmalink.
Although during this morning Bizland and Farmalink claimed to be operating since dawn, most pharmacies (including the largest Buenos Aires network in the field: Farmacity) confirmed that everything was still down. At the close of this article, however, Farmacity and Reinoso confirmed the gradual normalization of the system.
The patient, in the middle
The magnitude of the shock that caused the fall of this system must be attributed to the nature of its cause: it was not a domestic computer short circuit but a malicious attack perpetrated by an international criminal organization that, through negotiation, asked for a millionaire ransom to return the kidnapped data.
The Cybercrime Tax Unit (UFEC) is investigating the attack, which (it should be noted), is framed in a few particular days by the number of cyberattacks on public bodies or companies. As an example, it is enough to mention the one suffered by OSDE in mid-2022, the still unresolved hacks to the Ministry of Health and, a few weeks ago, those of an extortive nature against INTA and ANMAT.
It is a new form of violence. The damage it causes reaches a magnitude only understandable to those who know in depth the sensitive information violated.
In the case of the pharmacy network, the main victims, at least in these hours, are patients. Like pharmaceutical companies, they have to bear part of the cost.
Prepaid and social works
On Wednesday morning, in a large pharmacy in Villa Crespo, this reporter was explained that "discounts are being applied in a generalized way, according to the social or prepaid work that the person has."
It's like this: they made 40%, if one had certain prepaid, had the green, blue, 650, 100, or whatever plan is called. With some social works (such as the Judiciary), it was unified in applying 70% to all. Of other prepaid they did not make any discount because the rule indicated by the entity was "reimburse later".
That "after" implies that the person should either return to the pharmacy or process the reimbursement in the entity, once this computer storm has passed.
A pharmacist from the neighborhood of Barracas shared with Clarín her version of what "almost all pharmacists" have been doing. In addition to the previous options based on the specific indications of each health entity, he added that, "in many cases the patient is told that, if it is not an emergency, wait. Let him come back when the system is restored."
Regarding the payment of 100 percent of the medication out of the patient's pocket and the process for subsequent recovery, he opined – sensibly – that "it is not an option for everyone: there are drugs of a very high cost that the patient may not be able to afford."
And as a closing, he added that, in fact, "some patients are offered a drug of lower value. So you can start treatment until it works."
PS