Rashed Mian reports:
An unknown number of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center patients had clinical data and private information, in some cases their Social Security numbers, erroneously leaked onto two medical professional organization’s websites earlier this year, according to the hospital.
After an inquiry by the Long Island Press Wednesday, the world’s oldest and largest cancer center emailed a statement acknowledging that private information embedded behind a PowerPoint presentation landed on the Internet in April.
“As part of our ongoing data security efforts, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center recently discovered a data incident that may have resulted in exposure of clinical data and private information on the web pages of two medical professional organizations,” it reads. ”We became aware that the creation of graphs for a PowerPoint presentation inadvertently contained embedded information.”
Patients names, phone numbers, addresses and “in some cases” Social Security numbers could have been viewed if the PowerPoint presentation was manipulated, Christine Hickey, the cancer center’s director of communications said.
Read more on Long Island Press.
On a positive note, the hospital reports that it detected the problem itself during routine checking.
This is not the hospital’s first web exposure incident. They also reported one in the summer of 2009.