Albert Schweitzer Hospital accidentally deleted files from 200,000 patients – IT Pro – News

The Albert Schweitzer hospital, with locations in Dordrecht, Sliedrecht and Zwijndrecht, accidentally deleted 513,000 old digital files from the files of 212,000 patients by overwriting them with new files.

The hospital writes this in a letter to patients, who put Tweaker equit1986 on GOT† It states that the hospital can no longer retrieve the old files. The documents should have been kept for 20 years, but were accidentally overwritten by new files, using file names that were also used for the old files in the electronic health records. This includes referral letters, research results and notes from the practitioner.

This concerns, among other things, referral letters and research results from before September 2017. The files are old and as a rule were no longer used. When the EPD was introduced, the old paper documents were scanned and stored in a digital archive. These were files that the doctor thought would never be needed again and which were therefore not added to the EHR. The paper documents were destroyed at the time. These are files from before September 2017.

File names overwritten

Since 2017, new, up-to-date documents have been added digitally to the EHR, the hospital explains. An error was made, as a result of which, between November 2020 and October 2021, the old, archived files were overwritten by new files added by doctors. The error came to light when a clinician wanted to see a patient’s historical records, but came across a newer document. This turned out to have replaced the old scan.

The hospital, together with EHR supplier Chipsoft, launched an investigation into the cause and extent of the error and discovered that a total of 513,000 old documents from 212,000 patients have been permanently lost. In the letter, the hospital writes: “This error should not have happened and cannot happen again.”

A notification has been made to the Dutch Data Protection Authority, because, strictly speaking, there is a data breach. The hospital emphasizes that the documents have not been lost, but no longer exist and that they have never been ‘in the wrong hands’. The hospital also emphasizes that these are old files that have not been used for years. The hospital therefore tells patients: “The chance that there will still be consequences for your treatment is negligible. Only in special situations in which you would like to request your complete file in the future, we unfortunately cannot meet this 100 percent. “

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