The Hospital for Sick Children Loses Hard Drive, 3300 Affected
Technorati Tag: Security Breach
Date Reported:
8/31/07
Organization:
The Hospital for Sick Children (Sick Kids)
Contractor/Consultant:
None
Number Affected:
3,300
Types of Data:
Name, date of birth, diagnosis, ophthalmologic images, and photographs of eyes and eye injuries
Breach Description:
A doctor for the hospital lost an external hard drive at Pearson International Airport that contained the sensitive information on Sick Kids patients.
Reference URL:
http://www.thestar.com/living/article/251904
Report Credit:
Megan Oglivie, Health Reporter at Toronto Star
Response:
"Helen Simeon, director of public affairs at Sick Kids, said it took months to reconstruct the information and affected patients were not notified of the security breach until a letter was sent Aug. 28"
[Comfyllama] The hard drive was lost on April 21! Four months of reconstruction is a lot.
"Simeon said the lost files did not contain OHIP, telephone or social insurance numbers."
"Orders issued under the Personal Health Information Protection Act required Sick Kids to adopt strict policies to protect patient privacy, including a prohibition on removing electronic personal health information from the hospital unless it was encrypted."
[Comfyllama] These orders were issued after the very same hospital had a laptop stolen in January with personal health information on it.
Commentary:
Sick Kids has been in the press too many times this year in relation to lost privacy data. I hope they are making changes and making them as soon as possible.
There is not a lot of information publicly available around this latest breach. The hospital's Web site appears to be offline (http://www.sickkids.ca/) as of the time of this writing.
Past Breaches:
None since August 2007
Having online backup is as important as having the data in the first place itself. No data recovery arrangements means you can just as well kiss it goodbye. There are quite a number of data recovery programs available today, for different situations. There is a data recovery group online as well, that guides one in getting a suitable program. The risks of data loss have increased with the increasing incidence of file sharing.
Date Reported:
8/31/07
Organization:
The Hospital for Sick Children (Sick Kids)
Contractor/Consultant:
None
Number Affected:
3,300
Types of Data:
Name, date of birth, diagnosis, ophthalmologic images, and photographs of eyes and eye injuries
Breach Description:
A doctor for the hospital lost an external hard drive at Pearson International Airport that contained the sensitive information on Sick Kids patients.
Reference URL:
http://www.thestar.com/living/article/251904
Report Credit:
Megan Oglivie, Health Reporter at Toronto Star
Response:
"Helen Simeon, director of public affairs at Sick Kids, said it took months to reconstruct the information and affected patients were not notified of the security breach until a letter was sent Aug. 28"
[Comfyllama] The hard drive was lost on April 21! Four months of reconstruction is a lot.
"Simeon said the lost files did not contain OHIP, telephone or social insurance numbers."
"Orders issued under the Personal Health Information Protection Act required Sick Kids to adopt strict policies to protect patient privacy, including a prohibition on removing electronic personal health information from the hospital unless it was encrypted."
[Comfyllama] These orders were issued after the very same hospital had a laptop stolen in January with personal health information on it.
Commentary:
Sick Kids has been in the press too many times this year in relation to lost privacy data. I hope they are making changes and making them as soon as possible.
There is not a lot of information publicly available around this latest breach. The hospital's Web site appears to be offline (http://www.sickkids.ca/) as of the time of this writing.
Past Breaches:
None since August 2007
Having online backup is as important as having the data in the first place itself. No data recovery arrangements means you can just as well kiss it goodbye. There are quite a number of data recovery programs available today, for different situations. There is a data recovery group online as well, that guides one in getting a suitable program. The risks of data loss have increased with the increasing incidence of file sharing.
Posted by Evan Francen at 8/31/2007 10:49 AM 
Categories: The Hospital for Sick Children, Lost Device
Categories: The Hospital for Sick Children, Lost Device
Posts Atom 1.0
Four months of reconstruction is a lot. And how come they didn’t have a back up hard drive info??? They should have thought that something like this may happen.
Reply to this
Yes, four month is quite a lot of time when you think about it. I can't believe people still go about things without backups!
Reply to this
It's the doctors fault! Haven't he heard of backup?! I hope he's feeling guilty. But, it's not nice to judge.. it could've been us in his place, and we wouldn't like something like that to happen.
Reply to this
You would think in today’s world of super advance computer systems and data storage systems they would have a back up copy of all this information. It should not be possible for a hospital or any organisation to loose important information so easily. I hope the doctor who lost it is fired or at least demoted.
Reply to this