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Island Health dealing with Another Privacy Breach

Jul 11, 2016 | 10:10 AM

The issue of privacy breaches continues to plague Vancouver Island’s health authority.

For the fourth time in less than two years, Island Health is apologizing, after Friday’s announcement that 34 people had their records improperly accessed by an employee, between January 2015 and June 2016.

That employee no longer works for Island Health.

The improper access wasn’t discovered until recently, during a proactive audit, done in reaction to a similar incident last month.

In that instance, two Victoria based employees improperly accessed the records of 198 patients.

Island Health President and CEO Dr. Brendan Carr says moving forward, they need to focus on identifying improper information usage much earlier.

“We’ve been focusing on how can we be more sophisticated, in the use of technology, so that in fact we’re identifying much earlier if people are using information improperly. Or, even better, are better able to identify for people when they’re about to use information that the system is aware that they’re doing that,” said Carr.

“Simply doing retrospective audits is not good enough, we actually have to become more sophisticated and be able to be even more proactive about this.”

He says that improvement process is on-going constantly.

Carr still has confidence in their training program, designed to educate their staff about how they should and shouldn’t be using and accessing information.

“The fact that the vast majority of our staff are actually adhering to our policies I think suggests the training is probably effective. The question is really more around why does a small number of individuals feel that they can act outside of what is both the policy and culture of this organization.”

Nearly 400 patients have had their records improperly accessed by six employees, in four separate cases, since November 2014.

We asked Carr why patients should still have confidence in Island Health’s ability to protect their information, something he called a “fair question”.

“They should have confidence because the vast majority of them, their records are held in the strictest confidence. By virtue of the fact we now have a lot of information in electronic format, we are able to continually monitor that and are putting in better and stronger safeguards.”