A cyberattack prevents one of the largest drug wholesalers in Spain from distributing them to pharmacies

Two weeks after the serious cyberattack that hit the Hospital Clínic de Barcelona, ​​another major player in the healthcare system has been affected by hackers’ maneuvers. On this occasion, it has been the drug distribution chains to pharmacies that have been affected due to the problems suffered by Alliance Healthcare, as confirmed to EL PAÍS by four sources in the health sector.

“The problem started on Friday. The entire computer system collapsed: the website, the billing systems, the orders… The first few days they have been able to serve practically nothing, although in recent days they have been doing what they can”, explains a pharmacist with an office open in the metropolitan area of ​​Barcelona and which requests anonymity. This newspaper has tried unsuccessfully for several hours this Wednesday to connect to the company website.

Without going into details about what happened, the company has responded to questions from this newspaper with the following words: “Alliance Healthcare Spain has detected an interruption in the computer system and has immediately started up the appropriate equipment to limit its impact. The company’s customers and the patients they serve are their top priority. For this reason, Alliance Healthcare Spain is working quickly to solve the interruption”.

All the sources consulted coincide in emphasizing that the impact of the cyberattack “has plunged the sector into a kind of chaos in recent days”, but that “fortunately it has not affected patients in a very important way, except in some cases in which that the arrival of the necessary drugs could have taken longer”. This is so because it is common for each pharmacy to have more than one wholesaler from which it purchases the drugs, so if one of them fails, as in this case Alliance Healthcare, the others can supply.

“But sometimes it’s not that easy, because the other wholesalers can’t take on all the demand at once, there is always a lack of a product… With the chronic supply problems of some medicines, we only needed this,” laments another apothecary with open pharmacy in the province of Valencia.

There has been no risk of leaking patient data, since “this type of information does not reach wholesalers,” explain pharmaceutical distribution sources. “Our data is purely commercial, such as orders and billing between us and the pharmacies. We wholesalers do not have patient data”, adds this source.

Alliance Healthcare is the fourth largest medicines wholesaler in Spain, according to data from the sector, with a market share that exceeds 10% in the country as a whole and a turnover that in 2020 exceeded 1,400 million euros. Its presence, however, is much stronger in some communities such as Catalonia, where it reaches almost a quarter of the market and which, therefore, has now been more affected by cyberattacks.

In addition to pharmaceutical distribution, according to published company documentation, the company offers other services to pharmaceutical laboratories, has a subsidiary to support clinical trials, and is also present in the compounding market, among others. All of them have now been paralyzed by the cyberattack.