When dealing with bereaved families, funeral directors employ anodyne language and soothing tones.
Michael Williams, a funeral director in Winter Haven, dispensed with his normal decorum as he summarized the situation Florida’s funeral homes now confront.
“We’re going back to prehistoric times,” Williams, a funeral director at James C. Boyd Funeral Home, said in a voice of frustration.
At the least, funeral directors have been plunged back into a pre-modern era, if modern means having the ability to conduct essential tasks on computers.
A ransomware group has reportedly claimed that it hacked into the computer network of the Florida Department of Health and is freezing data until the agency pays an unspecified amount. The department has acknowledged a possible cyber-attack, WFTV reported.
The agency manages official state records, including birth certificates, marriage certificates and death certificates. It is the inability to receive and submit the latter electronically that is causing headaches for funeral homes.
“It’s made everything a lot more difficult and is slowing everything down — the process of getting death certificates for families,” said Bill Schichtel, vice president and funeral director at Heath Funeral Chapel in Lakeland. “But besides that, it's slowing the process down to getting approval to do cremations, because you have to have the death certificate signed by the doctor and approval from the medical examiner and the state before you can do that.”
A statement on the Florida Department of Health website reads: “There is currently a temporary outage of the online Vital Statistics system. As we work diligently to resolve this outage, all county health departments are able to assist the public with Vital Statistics offline.”
The vital records office for Polk County, administered by the state agency, occupies space in the Northeast Government Center in Lake Alfred. Since the state system went offline on June 26, funeral homes have had to send employees to the Lake Alfred office to deliver death forms and later to collect death certificates, Schichtel said.
“From start to finish, everything is very difficult,” said Schichtel, who has worked at the family business since the 1980s. “It’s a slower process. So basically, we've gone back to the dark ages, for the original way you do things.”
Funeral homes are required to obtain death certificates before carrying out cremations, and the lost access to the state’s electronic system is causing delays, Schichtel said. The delays have disrupted some plans for services, he said.
“We had one family that wanted to take their (relative’s) ashes back to, I think, the Dominican Republic, and they were very, very upset,” Schichtel said. “And I understand. They get everything prepared, and they get their flights, and we can't do anything until everything is completed on the doctor side or the medical examiner side. Our hands are tied. We only can go as fast as everybody else can go.”
The delays could cause problems that go beyond inconvenience for family members, Schichtel said.
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“I know it's putting a pinch on some of the funeral homes that do not have a lot of cooler space because they're getting overfull because the processing is slowing down,” he said.
Williams, the funeral director at James C. Boyd Funeral Home, displayed exasperation as he talked about the loss of computer access to records.
“This is crazy,” he said. “This is difficult. It's just making things difficult. You're losing money. You lose a resource. It’s a mess because you're hiring people to do a job that we can normally do on a computer, so now there's more manpower that needs to be hired.”
Williams referred to the need to have someone drive to and from the office in Lake Alfred to deliver and retrieve death certificates.
The outage has also affected the Medical Examiner’s Office for the 10th Judicial Circuit, based in Winter Haven. The office has lost access to the Electronic Death Registration System, the state database used to enter death records.
The Medical Examiner’s Office has returned to using fax machines to receive and send records, a spokesperson said. A doctor must review the records before the office issues a cremation authorization number, which a funeral home must receive before carrying out a cremation.
Heath Funeral Chapel is a member of the Independent Funeral Directors of Florida. Schichtel said he is awaiting word from the association about a possible resolution of the problem.
“The worst thing is, there’s no end in sight,” Schichtel said. “This may never end.”
Gary White can be reached at gary.white@theledger.com or 863-802-7518. Follow on X @garywhite13.
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