A healthcare sector breach out of South Africa.
Andrew Stone reports:
Health authorities were scrambling yesterday to find out how thousands of confidential patient records ended up being freely available on the Internet. A team of 20 investigators from both the Eastern Cape and Western Cape Health departments have been tasked to find out how the bungle occurred.
Urgent moves to stop public access to the patient records, however, are still not over – the Daily Dispatch was still able yesterday to access information on Frere Hospital patients on the Internet.
The Dispatch reported yesterday on the shocking breach of State hospital patient confidentiality after accessing thousands of private records on a government Internet server.
The information included patients’ personal details such as their names, telephone numbers and home addresses.
The outpatient files were on a server hosting the Western Cape’s Karl Bremmer Hospital website, where records of State hospital patients from around the Eastern Cape are stored.
Even though access to the files was quickly blocked after the Dispatch reported the problem to the Karl Bremmer Hospital, the information was still freely available yesterday through Google cache files.
Read more in the Daily Dispatch.