Roisin Burke reports:
Hundreds of patient records were seriously compromised by a major security breach at the HSE, the Sunday Independent has learned.
The 1,500 sensitive health records were removed from a Dublin office and emailed to an outside organisation.
A private IT contractor, who was being overseen by a HSE staff member, downloaded the records on to an unencrypted USB key — something that is absolutely forbidden in the HSE’s own protocols.
The contractor took the private health records home to work on overnight — again a serious breach of the health authority’s procedures.
Intending to email the records on the memory stick back to the HSE, the contractor mistyped the address and instead accidentally emailed them to another State body.
The security breach was only discovered when the public body involved alerted the HSE.
Read more in the Sunday Independent. The report doesn’t indicate specifically what kinds of patient information are involved, but somehow, I expect we’ll see follow-up on this one. Paging the Data Protection Commissioner to Aisle 4….
Hat-tip, @tjmcintyre via Brian Honan.
Cross-posted from PHIprivacy.net