One In Four Indiana Residents' E-Record Data Exposed in Hack

Reader chicksdaddy reports that a data breach involving four million patients and more than 230 different data holders (from private practices to large hospitals) hit Indiana especially hard. It's the home state of Medical Informatics Engineering, maker of electronic records system NoMoreClipBoard. While data exposed in the breach affected 3.9 million people, 1.5 millon of them are in Indiana. According to the Security Ledger, though: [The] breach affects healthcare organizations from across the country, with healthcare providers ranging from prominent hospitals to individual physicians' offices and clinics are among 195 customers of the NoMoreClipboard product that had patient information exposed in the breach. And, more than a month after the breach was discovered, some healthcare organizations whose patients were affected are still waiting for data from EMI on how many and which patients had information exposed.

'We have received no information from MIE regarding that,' said a spokeswoman for Fort Wayne Radiology Association (http://www.fwradiology.com/), one of hundreds of healthcare organizations whose information was compromised in the attack on MIE..

Comments

Re:clipboards?

[Z34107]

What was so bad about clipboards again?

Clipboards have a bunch of known deficiencies. They're effectively write-only, especially if no one else can read the doc's handwriting.

Then, they're hard to duplicate. Should you end up in the hospital (heaven forbid), hopefully you're conscious enough to explain your drug allergies to the EMT, because it'll take a while to find out which clinic you normally see and get a copy of their clipboard. Then the copy of the clinic clipboard ends up in the hospital's clipboard, but the stuff in the hospital clipboard probably won't make it back to the clinic clipboard.

There's also only one copy of the hospital clipboard, so the cardiologist treating your heart attack can't put notes in your clipboard if the hospitalist took it to figure out what meds you were (or should be) on. If they do make copies, someone has to make sure the cardiologist's annotations make it into all of them without error. Those charts then have to be stored in a giant bunker somewhere, forever.

Clipboards are also bad at medication safety. When you're giving millions of med administrations to millions of patients, eventually you end up giving the wrong drug to the wrong one. Clipboards can't verify that you nabbed the right patient or the right drug, which kills people once you scale up the mistakes that would have happened to a national level.

Even before the nurse gives the meds, a clipboard can't tell the doctor that one of the medications he's ordering will interact with the medications someone else ordered. That also kills people. If one lot of those medications was tainted and recalled, it's also really, really hard to find out who was affected if all your administrations are documented on paper.

Finally, it's really hard to bill correctly if all of your documentation is on paper. If the coder going over the clipboard misses a charge, the hospital loses out on money. If the coder invents a charge, you lose out on money. If the coder can't find whatever documentation a kafkaesque insurance company demands to justify a procedure, you both lose out on money. Also harder to reject a claim for not being written in blue pen with block caps when the claim is electronic.

There's a bunch of other ways clipboards suck, and a bunch of ways the clipboard-replacements suck, but the former tends to suck a lot more than the latter.