American healthcare has problems with personal data protection

The privacy of patients in American hospitals has recently been threatened by frequent leakages of confidential data and medical records.

The frequency of data leakages is startling with medical facilities where protection of patients’ records should be one of the most important principles. Hundreds of thousands of names, addresses, medical records and other personal data were threatened in the past few weeks:

• 24,600 records were lost on a flash disk from the Our Lady of Peace hospital in Louisville, Kentucky.
• 180,111 medical records were stolen with an unencrypted portable disk from the Emergency Healthcare Physicians in Hinsdale.
• 20,000 patients’ records were stolen from a computer in St. Judy Hospital in Fullerton, California.
• A disk stolen from a health care centre in Bowling Green, Kentucky contained medical records of 5,418 patients.

The easiest solution would be introduction of software which would protect data stored both on computers and portable disks. This way the damages would be minimal in all above-stated cases.

(source: statistics of datalossdb.org database)