SASKATCHEWAN COMPUTER CONTAINING GOVERNMENT HEALTH DATA STOLEN CBC Saskatchewan - Computer containing health data stolen: "Computer containing health data stolen
Last Updated Apr 12 2006 12:43 PM CDT
CBC News

The province is trying to reassure people that sensitive personal data is not being misused after a computer containing health information was stolen.

A laptop computer containing data from the Saskatchewan Health Information Network was stolen during a break-in at a software contractor's office in Toronto late last month.

It contained the health records of about 1,500 people from the Heartland and Regina-Qu'Appelle health regions.

The Heartland health region is in the Rosetown area in west-central Saskatchewan.

Officials say the individual names had been removed from those files and there was no way of identifying patients from the data.

The files contained 'health registration numbers,' but those numbers were 'heavily encrypted,' the government said.

The files were given to Praxia Information Intelligence in Toronto, which is developing and testing software for analyzing long-term patient care in Saskatchewan. The stolen computer hasn't been recovered.

Saskatchewan Health says the files were encrypted and the computer was password protected.

As a result, the government has decided it will not be sending out individual letters to the people whose information was on the hard drive.

The Health Department has also consulted with the privacy commissioner to explain what happened.

The government has been sensitive to the loss of personal data since an incident in 2003, when a hard drive was stolen from a Regina company's offices.

That hard drive contained personal information on more than a million people.