I was just reading through the VA’s Monthly Report to Congress of Data Incidents for the period Nov 29, 2010 – Jan 2, 2010. Apart from the usual reports about mis-mailings and the like, I noticed two incidents worth noting here:
Incident Summary – White River Junction, VT:
A Dartmouth owned thin client device located in the Gastro-Intestinal (GI) Department at the VA Medical Center allowed for anonymous log on with no password. When the GI residents would use the anonymous log on, a document was viewable that contained Veteran and Dartmouth patient information. The document contained a list of both VA and Dartmouth patients identified by last name, last 4 of SSN, clinical diagnosis, and comments.According to the Privacy Officer, there are no other documents stored like this on the Dartmouth device. The last name and last 4 of the SSN for 114 patients are on the document, and one patient is identified by full name and DOB. This document was on the system for an unspecified amount of time. It is unknown if the information was breached or not, but the profile used an anonymous log on without a password, so security was minimal. The residents have been instructed to discontinue this practice. There is a VA-approved folder where residents can store this data on the VA network.
The 114 patients will be sent letters of notification and one patient will be sent a letter offering credit protection services.
Resolution
The spreadsheet was deleted from the thin client server by the facility CIO. The resident responsible was educated regarding the violation of privacy practices. The GI section will also receive privacy training.
Incident Summary – Durham, North Carolina:
A log book containing future appointments for all patients in the Dermatology Clinic is missing. The log book contains the patients’ name, last four of the SSN, telephone number and the name of the procedure to be performed.Incident Update 01/03/11:
The Dermatology clinic was searched by Dermatology staff but the log book was not located. The Information Security Officer made a cursory examination of the spaces where the log book might be found without success. All staff in the Dermatology Clinic and clinicians from the Infectious Disease Clinics were individually
contacted to see if the log book could be located. Staff from the Durham Office of Information and Technology will run a report on 01/03/11 to ascertain how many patients’ information was in the log book.01/05/11:
There was an additional search by the VA Police and the logbook still has not been found. The log book was last seen in the room with the last of the two patients. As of 10/04/11 (sic), the last patient who was seen on the day in question still had not returned the VA’s call.The final count of patients listed in the missing log book was 55. There were no DOBs or full SSNs listed. Therefore 55 patients will receive a letter of notification.
Paper logs have been removed and future tracking will be electronic for enhanced security purposes.
These reports to Congress really provide an interesting window into privacy and security at the VA, and are somewhat reassuring in terms of how seriously they seem to take incidents. I think that over time, we’ll have to look at the number of mis-mailings and other more common types of incidents to determine if they’ve been able to reduce the number of such incidents, but all in all, given the size of the organization and the number and types of transactions, I think this is pretty impressive.