CBC News reports:
The Saskatchewan Health Ministry is writing to 58 West Nile virus patients about a potential breach of their private health information.
It happened during a health management class in 2005 and 2006 at the Saskatchewan Institute of Applied Science and Technology.
Up to 140 students in a health information management course were using information from West Nile patients that was on file from 2003.
West Nile fever, caused by the virus, typically comes with mild flu-like symptoms, but in rare cases can lead to paralysis or even death.
The information was aggregated, but there was a source file students had access to that contained the individual health records.
[…]
The potential breach was discovered when SIAST sent the old records back for an update. At that time, the health ministry discovered what had happened.
Read more on CBC News.
A statement posted on the ministry’s site says:
The Saskatchewan Ministry of Health is informing 58 patients of a privacy breach involving their personal health information.
Personal health information from 2003 was on a file that was used in an instructional setting in a health management course at the Saskatchewan Institute of Applied Science and Technology (SIAST) Regina campus beginning in 2005-06.
The Ministry of Health is working with the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner (OIPC) to determine how the incident happened and to ensure that a breach of this nature does not occur again. The Ministry has also informed SIAST about the situation to ensure the information is no longer in use.
“We take this incident very seriously and are immediately taking steps to make sure this does not happen again,” Ministry of Health Director of Information Policy Sara Hawryluk said. “We sincerely regret any concern or inconvenience this causes to patients.”
Up to 140 students may have viewed the personal health data. The Ministry understands that in the instructional setting, individual personal health information would not likely have been accessed or viewed; however, it was a part of the source file used to show aggregate data by age, gender and region.
All 58 patients whose information was involved are being contacted by the Ministry of Health to advise them of the breach and explain the measures being taken.
The Ministry of Health has strong privacy, confidentiality and security protection in place through the Health Information Protection Act (HIPA), and is committed to continuously improving these safeguards. The Ministry is following OIPC privacy breach guidelines, to determine additional steps that could be taken to reduce the possibility of a similar situation occurring in the future.
I’ve e-mailed the ministry to inquire whether it would have been possible for students to download the source files and whether this only occurred in 2005-2006 or if it continued in other courses thereafter. I’ll update this post if I get an answer.
Update 1: The Regina Leader-Post reports that the instructional materials were used over the past 8 years. They also report:
As part of the course, information on the file was used to group public health trends — by age, gender and health region — in charts and graphs rather than being used to look at individual data. Some students in the distance-education program would also have had remote access to the file.
So… can they tell whether the file was downloaded 8 years ago or since then? Possibly not.