Data Breach
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https://chicago.suntimes.com/2022/10/20/23414762/advocate-aurora-patient-data-breach
Advocate Aurora Health, the largest hospital system in Illinois and Wisconsin, said data for an unspecified number of its 3 million patients was breached.
In a statement, Advocate officials said they “are not aware of any misuse of information” from the recent incident.
In a statement on its website, the hospital system blamed the use of tracking technology from sources such as Facebook and Google that was intended to “evaluate information concerning the trends and preferences of its patients as they use our websites.”
“These technologies disclose certain details about interactions with our websites, particularly for users that are concurrently logged into their Google or Facebook accounts and have shared their identity and other surfing habits with these companies,” Advocate said in the statement.
Technology installed through patient portals on MyChart and LiveWell websites and apps and some scheduling software “transmitted certain patient information” to third-party vendors of Advocate.
The hospital system disabled the technology and “launched an internal investigation to better understand what patient information was transmitted.”
“We take patient privacy very seriously, employ robust internal controls to protect patient data and are committed to compliance with all laws applicable to our operations,” Advocate said in a statement to the media.
D2 lives in the Milwaukee area, and I sent her this story.
Her response:
With the Epic merger a few years ago, something got into my record. Apparently, I broke my leg in Green Bay in the 90s. I've also had a cardiac treatment a few years ago in Waupun (never been). I have been trying to get that corrected for about 2 years now. Aurora (where I have never received medical care in Wisconsin, btw) stopped returning my calls.
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Patient identification has always been an issue in healthcare. Every system since time immemorial has had an algorithm of one sort or another to determine whether you have the right patient. Epic's is pretty robust. I have to believe these errors come from feeding Epic from other systems, probably in data conversions.
