Tewksbury Hospital in Massachusetts terminates worker after long-term snooping

A worker at Tewksbury Hospital in Massachusetts was discovered to be occasionally snooping in sufferers’ electronic medical records without clinical justification.

The inappropriate access of medical records occurred from the year of 2003 until it was discovered this past spring. Now, the facility—one of four hospitals in the Massachusetts Department of Public Health serving complex chronically ill adult sufferers and psychiatric patients—has notified more than 1,100 affected people.

Tewksbury Hospital officials say they learned of the breach in April, when a former patient expressed concern that their medical record might have been inappropriately accessed. Compromised data involved names, addresses, and dates of birth, gender, diagnoses and medical treatments. Less than half of the records involved viewing of Social Security numbers, according to the hospital.

The state’s department of health has terminated the worker.

“To decrease the chance of future tragedies like this occurring, we are reviewing our policies regarding access to the electronic medical records system,” Tewksbury executives noted in a statement. “We’re also reassessing how we review our workforce members’ use of the electronic medical records system and will be reviewing the training we provide to all workforce members regarding the privacy and security of confidential information.”

Tewksbury Hospital is advising affected people to notify credit reporting agencies, order a credit report and review it for signs of fraud, and request a security freeze to prevent the opening of new accounts using the compromised information.

In its notification to sufferers, Tewksbury Hospital is not offering credit monitoring or identity theft protection services. Currently, there is no indication that information has been accessed or misused, in accordance with a spokesperson for the hospital.

The hospital refused to give additional details about the incident, and did not comment on why the inappropriate access had gone undetected for fourteen years.

 

Zika Virus Latest Research Indicates Lingering Issues

School of Public Health professor Marcia C. de Castro showed Zika Virus latest research on the day of Wednesday that discovered that birth rates in Latin America haven’t fallen in the months following the Zika epidemic.

The seminar, hosted by the Brazil Studies Seminar Series and termed as “Impact of the Zika Virus Outbreak on Brazilian Fertility,” looked at abortion, historical birth rates, approach to contraceptives, and the spread of the Zika virus itself to indicate why birth rates failed to fall, despite the known threat of having a kid while infected with the virus. Zika Virus Latest Research Indicated Lingering Issues.

Castro attributed the constant birth amount to ineffectiveness in birth control program of Brazil. Although 87% of females have access to contraception, a high rate of contraceptive misuse means that 40% of Brazilian pregnancies are unwanted, Castro stated.

“To have a reduction in the unwanted pregnancy, that means that females should have control of it in the first place. Access to contraception does not seem to be the issue. Using it rightly is still a problem in Brazil,” Castro stated.

She adds that Zika is mostly asymptomatic. “We’ve various records of women who delivered babies with congenital Zika syndrome and they never had symptoms during the time of pregnancy,” Castro said. Zika Virus Latest Research Indicated Lingering Issues.

Castro also shared developments indicating that the Zika virus can have a diverse range of impacts—beyond microcephaly, which causes babies to have smaller heads—on fetuses. Many kids thought to be healthy at birth were later discovered to have Zika-based impairments. In accordance to Castro, 20% of children with brain damage had “perfectly normal head sizes.”

Rather than trying to lower birth rates, Castro explained that the Brazilian government might decrease incidence of Zika by improving infrastructure to reduce standing water. She referred one survey showing that 85% of mosquito breeding habitats are domestic water containers.

Although, while Castro discovered the Brazilian government’s infrastructure improvements to be virtually non-existent, some attendees were yet impressed by her description of how the government tried to combat Zika.

“All the information they gave, all the help they gave to women, to everyone...dealing with the problem.” stated Patricia C. McCormick, a seminar attendee. “It’s amazing. Hats off.”

While Zika transmission rates have fallen, Castro asserted that the virus was down but not out.

“Infections do have a cycle and they peak and they come down,” she claimed. “If you look at [mosquito-borne viral illness] dengue, every three3 years or so it is epidemic, and then it comes down. Most likely [Zika] is going to have the similar pattern.”