Privacy & Security

NANAIMO, B.C. – Island Health has fired an employee following a privacy breach of 102 people at Nanaimo Regional General Hospital. The breach involved an employee who is “no longer associated with Island Health,” the authority said. Read More

VICTORIA – B.C. privacy commissioner Michael McEvoy (pictured) says it should be illegal to snoop in a patient’s medical files, as recently happened at Nanaimo Regional General Hospital. “The time has come to act,” McEvoy told the Times Colonist newspaper. “The time is actually well past when we should have acted on this.” Read More

TORONTO – The University Health Network (UHN) has changed the way it uses pagers to communicate after a local radio station discovered the health information of more than 200 patients was easily accessible to the public. Read More

NIAGARA FALLS, Ont. – Niagara Health (NH) has announced the launch of a multi-year program for the Niagara Health Navigator, a mobile application designed to protect patient privacy and security while connecting patients to their health data, care providers and innovators. Read More

REGINA – Saskatchewan’s privacy commissioner has found eight people inappropriately gained access to the electronic health records of 10 Humboldt Broncos team members involved in a bus crash last April. Read More

TORONTO – The Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario is launching an investigation after the Toronto Star newspaper published a story about the sale of anonymized medical records in the province. Read More

SUDBURY, Ont. – A computer virus at Health Sciences North led the hospital to shut down various medical systems to avoid the problem from spreading. Staff at the hospital in Sudbury called it a “zero-day virus,” meaning a virus that is was not recognized or captured by the anti-virus tools on the market. Read More

YELLOWKNIFE, NWT – The Northwest Territories’ privacy commissioner says she will investigate what she calls a “major breach,” after CBC reported that a man found hundreds of confidential medical records at a dump. Read More

HALIFAX – A proposed settlement worth approximately $400,000 has been reached in a Nova Scotia class-action lawsuit concerning the improper access of patient information by an employee of the former Capital District Health Authority, according to a law firm involved in the case. Read More