Category: Health Data

Ponemon has released a new survey on data breaches in the healthcare sector.  The Second Annual Benchmark Study on Patient Privacy and Data Security, sponsored by ID Experts, is available on their web site, but I want to pull out a few points from the results that I think are worth noting: The number of…

More on that breach at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary a few weeks ago when a patient complained of being contacted on Facebook by a cleaner who learned her name while she was in the emergency ward. The hospital subsequently reported that he had not accessed her information from any database but had seen her name on…

Short and to the point from CJOB in Manitoba: A health clinic in Flin Flon has stepped up its policies on the destruction of personal health information. Someone contacted the Manitoba Ombudsman’s office after partially burned medical records containing personal health information were found blowing near a highway and gravel pit. The Ombudsman investigated and…

Since Big Brother Watch came out with a report on breaches disclosed in freedom of information requests, there have been a number of stories about individual councils. This is just one of them. Adam Courtney reports: A security breach saw Hammersmith and Fulham Council lose the confidential health records of 3,500 people which were being…

Over on DataBreaches.net, I’ve struggled to keep up with all the hacks that dump PII on the Internet.  But there’s one from yesterday that involves patient data that should be mentioned here.  A hack of vaguscosmetics.net (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) reveals 1,973  2,555 patients’ information.  Here are the data fields from the dumped database:…

A follow-up from Scotsman.com on  a breach at the Edinburgh Royal  Infirmary mentioned previously on this blog: … NHS Lothian last night said that the cleaner had not breached the hospital’s computer systems and said instead that her name was on a computerised floor plan in the A&E ward. Jackie Sansbury, chief operating officer at…