NC breach tied to effort to increase transparency
Payments made to patients of North Carolina state hospitals have been posted on a public website—perhaps for years.
The North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services is notifying about 1,300 individuals about the breach.
The department in 2009 started building NC OpenBook, a searchable website on state spending for grants and contracts as part of a process to improve transparency. Officials recently discovered, however, that information regarding all payments made from its state hospital accounts has been posted on NC OpenBook.
Compromised information included name, address, date of payment, dollar amount and name of the paying facility. The information now is not accessible and procedures have been changed to ensure the information stays off the website, according to the department.
Editor Beth earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism and master’s in health communication. She has worked in hospital, academic and publishing settings over the past 20 years. Beth joined TriMed in 2005, as editor of CMIO and Clinical Innovation + Technology. When not covering all things related to health IT, she spends time with her husband and three children.