New Zealand Ministry of Health Data Breach (2017)

A new patient information system used by general practitioners had to be disabled yesterday because of a risk of data breach. ``The ministry understands that patient demographic data has been transported from GP practices in an unencrypted form to an online Medtech hub. ``The sort of information that was transported without encryption includes the name, date of birth and gender of a patient. ``In light of the potential risk, the ministry has requested Medtech to temporarily disable the services that transports the information to its hub until Medtech issues a fix, which is expected later this week,'' the ministry said. An authorised administrator at a PHO had reported he could see data in an unencrypted form. ``Once alerted to the problem Medtech immediately secured the links and started work on a permanent fix.''