> There's no good reason to have personally identifiable information stored in the system.
They’re medical records. Seems inherently likely to be PII?
They’re medical records. Seems inherently likely to be PII?
You might say that there would be other person names and places in mentioned in the records and from that network and timeline you may be able to deduce the identity.. but these PII can in turn be depersonalised. And also this is not scalable for widespread damage.
It just need a bit of thinking when designing a system. Frankly any org that ask for PII and doesn't have a well thought out way to store them should be heavily penalised.
That's what the law should do standardised methods of storing sensitive data.
That's ignoring the fact almost nobody will accept having to keep track of an "alphanumeric ID" to get treatment.
This may not be the status quo of the medical system. But I'm willing to bet it wasn't conceived and put in place when breaches like this could happen frequently and the consequences were damning. Overhaul of the process is required. Just keep paying the Ransom/Hackers is not the only and meaningful solution.
John Doe | Street 1234 | Therapy | 6 Units | $12,367
That is way less interesting information than what we are discussing here...
A lot of detailed information is often required for the payer to green-light the actual treatment, at least in Germany.
Ideally the payer also wants/needs to keep track of what was already done and for what reasons.
Even if you keep all of that to a minimum, you still end up with a fair bit of meta-data that allows for rather detailed insights.
It turns out this is not as easy as you think it is.
Now the doctor is unable to verify the identity of the patient.
Do you mean store without names? The conditions, times, places, etc, are inherently PII themselves.
My wife gave birth on a given day in a given hospital. She also broke her ankle once. No names, but record uniquely identified.
By removing the directly identifiable info, the damage done in a breach would be less. Where as now, a single breach contains all the data that could identify a person and every person in that breach, without having to do any/much reverse look up.
Now, the orgs that collect this data does not have a certification standard and verification that they have to obtain before going operational. Even a restaurant kitchen has that.
On that note, I'd say that there should be a severity grading for the data items. Even Eggs have a grading system. Our personal data is a tad more valuable.