Do You Know Where Your Sensitive Medical Information Is Right Now?
We all know that doctors and hospitals screw up sometimes. We’ve heard of surgeons amputating the wrong limb, or patients being given the wrong medication, or some other egregious mistake.
But do hospitals make other mistakes that might be putting you and your family in harm’s way – even when you’re not physically at the hospital?
Turns out, yes, that problem is happening quite frequently due to the frailty of online medical records.
Just take the recent case in California that affected 20,000 innocent people who had nothing in common except for the fact they had each visited the same emergency room over a six-month period.
Multi-Specialty Collection Services, a Stanford University hospital billing sub-contractor, had a detailed spreadsheet of 20,000 emergency room patients seen in the department between March 1, 2009-August 31, 2009. The unencrypted file – which contained patient names, billing charges, and medical record numbers – was somehow accessed inappropriately and then posted online.
A former patient at Stanford Hospital and Clinics first spotted the file online and immediately notified the hospital.
A hospital spokesman confirmed that the medical file was removed from the website upon learning of the data breach. The spokesman said patients' Social Security numbers were not involved in the breach, though the hospital is still offering affected patients free identity-protection services.
The Palo Alto, California-based incident spotlights the ongoing weaknesses for patients all around the country who allow hospitals and outside contractor access to sensitive information.
Twist of Irony
In a strange twist of irony, nearly 2,000 patient files were hacked at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston this past summer. And Dr. Kevin Tabb, the former chief medical officer at Stanford Hospitals and Clinics, will become the new CEO of Beth Israel in Boston this month.
In the Beth Israel case, a machine at the Boston hospital was found to be infected with a computer virus, which transmitted data files to an unknown location. The computer contained medical record numbers, names, genders, and birth dates of 2,021 patients, as well as the names and dates of radiology procedures they had undergone.
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