Scripps Health

Scripps Health is a nonprofit integrated health system headquartered in San Diego, California, doing business as Scripps Health and Scripps HealthCare. It provides acute inpatient care at its hospitals, outpatient physician services through Scripps Clinic, urgent care centers, emergency departments, home‑health visits, and a regional health plan that offers insurance products to employers and individuals. The organization’s clinical portfolio includes nationally recognized programs in cardiac surgery, cancer treatment, neuroscience, orthopedics, women’s health, and pediatrics, with specific centers of excellence such as the Levitt Family Heart Institute at Scripps Green Hospital and the Prebys Cardiovascular Institute at Scripps Memorial Hospital La Jolla. Scripps Health also operates a Level I trauma center at Scripps Mercy Hospital San Diego. Beyond direct patient care, the system runs community health initiatives, preventive wellness programs, and health‑education outreach aimed at reducing disparities and improving population health across Southern California.

Scripps Health’s physical footprint comprises five hospital campuses—Scripps Memorial Hospital La Jolla, Scripps Memorial Hospital Encinitas, Scripps Mercy Hospital San Diego, Scripps Mercy Hospital Chula Vista, and Scripps Green Hospital—supported by more than fifty outpatient clinics, ambulatory surgery centers, diagnostic imaging sites, and home‑care locations throughout San Diego County and adjacent regions. The system employs roughly fourteen thousand individuals, including physicians, nurses, allied health professionals, administrative staff, and technical personnel, enabling it to manage hundreds of thousands of inpatient admissions and several million outpatient encounters each year. Scripps Health maintains an active graduate medical education program, sponsoring residency and fellowship training in specialties such as internal medicine, surgery, psychiatry, and radiology for physicians-in-training affiliated with the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and other academic partners. Through its close relationship with the Scripps Research Institute, the organization facilitates translational research, clinical trials, and precision‑medicine initiatives that bring laboratory discoveries to patient bedside care. Scripps Clinic, the employed physician group of Scripps Health, delivers primary and specialty care across the same geographic network, ensuring continuity of care between hospital and outpatient settings.

In May 2021, Scripps Health was targeted by a ransomware attack that encrypted critical IT systems, resulting in the temporary shutdown of online patient portals, electronic health record access, and medical imaging platforms across its facilities. During the incident, the health system sustained emergency and urgent care using paper‑based workflows, diverted certain high‑acuity patients such as stroke and heart attack cases to neighboring hospitals, and coordinated with law‑enforcement agencies to investigate and restore operations. The disruption underscored the organization’s dependence on digital infrastructure while demonstrating its ability to maintain essential services through contingency procedures and communication plans. After a period of system restoration, Scripps Health reported that normal operations resumed and that it subsequently strengthened its cybersecurity defenses, including enhanced monitoring, employee training, and incident‑response planning to reduce the likelihood of future attacks.