Noel Towell and Rania Spooner report:
Health Minister Sussan Ley has apologised to doctors over the accidental leaking of sensitive Medicare data.
The federal privacy watchdog will assess Health Department claims that no patients’ medical information has been released after sensitive information on the Pharmaceutical Benefits and Medicare Benefits schemes was accidentally leaked by the department.
[…]
The department says it discovered the vulnerability in the information after researchers at the University of Melbourne contacted Health and said they had been able to decrypt some of the data, revealing the ID numbers of some service providers.
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