A Kentucky hospital is notifying patients that their personal information may have been compromised after a computer hard drive was stolen from the facility's mammography unit.
The Medical Center in Bowling Green said on April 28 that the security of 5,418 patient records involving bone densitometry tests performed at the hospital between 1997 and 2009 was breached when a piece of computer equipment was stolen from its mammography suite.
Center officials discovered the theft from a locked, nonpublic area where the hard drive was kept on April 1, and they have been scrambling to notify patients that their demographic information and potentially their social security numbers have been compromised.
The information on the stolen hard drive was not encrypted, according to hospital spokesperson vice president Doris Thomas. The hospital is now archiving data to a secure network and is verifying that it does not use any portable hard drives containing nonencrypted data.
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