Annie Freeda Cruez reports:
Some 46,000 electronic images of X-rays and scans of patients at University Malaya Medical Centre (UMMC) have been lost during a migration process from the old computer system to a new one.
As a result, some patients may be left in the lurch as their old medical information dating back to 2000 are unavailable.
The problem arose over the last two years when an American multi-national company, given the task of migrating a few million images of patients to the new system, lost the 46,000 images.
Read more on The Sun Daily.
I contacted Ms. Cruez to inquire whether she knew the name of the American company, but alas, she did not know. I’ve also emailed UMMC to ask them, and if I hear back, I’ll update this post. How do you lose 46,000 images over a two-year period? Was this one incident in which files were accidentally discarded prior to scanning, did someone steal them, or was there an accumulation of smaller errors? In any event, this is a data loss that can affect medical care, and should give all entities food for thought about how to prevent such problems.
uh oh…I wonder if this is GE. 🙂