When a former patient at West Penn hospital went online to pay her bill, she discovered that she could access 85 other patients’ information, including their names, addresses, medical procedures and costs.
When the hospital did not reply to two emails she sent alerting them to the problem, she went to a news station, and that’s when the hospital started dealing with the problem.
A hospital spokesman blamed the problem on a temporary data translation error involving a third-party billing partner.
“We immediately disabled the online bill payment service to complete a full audit of the system. We are working to institute additional safeguards and cross-checks with out third party service to ensure that this issues is completely resolved,” said spokesman Dan Laurent.
Laurent said this was an isolated incident and that only 15 patients had their information viewed.
Source – WPXI