Elise Stolte reports:
Two hundred thirty-three Covenant Health patient folders containing about 3,600 photos and two videos are on an unencrypted hard drive that has gone missing, said Patrick Dumelie, president and CEO, at a media event Monday morning.
Dumelie stresses that the original files are safe and that while all of the files contain patients’ names, only four of the missing copies may contain patients’ dates of birth, financial or other private information.
Of the 233 affected patients, 147 have been contacted and informed by Covenant Health. The images, which were of wounds, lab specimens and, in some cases, dead infants, were taken at the Misericordia Hospital between 2002 and 2010, and were not stored according to Covenant Health policies regarding protection of information.
Dumelie apologized for the incident in a news release.
[…]
The hard drive was placed under the desk of an employee who was packing up his office and moving to another location on January 17. When he returned to the office on January 28, he noticed the hard drive was gone. The hospital asked all of its managers to search their areas, with no success. There was no sign of a break-in, so officials don’t believe the images were taken on purpose.
Read more in the Edmonton Journal.