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Monday, September 12, 2011

Stanford Data Breach Makes 20,000 ER Patient Records Public

For nearly a year, the medical records of more than 20,000 emergency room patients who were treated at Stanford Hospital in Palo Alto, Calif., were broadcast publicly on a commercial website, according to a report in the New York Times.


Patient data, including names, diagnosis codes and billing charges, for the thousands of people who were admitted to the Stanford hospital over a six-month period in 2009, were posted in a spreadsheet on the website Student of Fortune, the Times' Kevin Sack reports. The site, which offers students homework assistance for a fee, used the spreadsheet to demonstrate how to convert data into bar graphs.


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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

anyone & everyone has access to medical records (think, all personnel on one floor of one hospital, & from there on.) except the patient. Those records are kept from the individual as though they were nuclear secrets. computers make it worse...& yet you need to continue feeding the records with the same old, same old information...cause nobody looks at the old records. But, they know where to send the bill!

Anonymous said...

Not to mention that there's stuff in our records that is sometimes wrong but we have no way of knowing it until we're turned down for insurance, insurance is cancelled or are treated down the road for something incorrectly because that doctor is led to believe there is another contributing factor that does not really exist.