HONG KONG: The Hospital Authority (HA) said new measures to protect the privacy of patients will be in place by the end of this month.

The new safeguards emerge from a spate of incidents over the past two years in which computer data containing personal information of hundreds of patients has been lost through negligence, or stolen.

Under the new policy, patient data will be stored on a server accessible to medical workers by password. One of the objectives of the program is to put an end to the practice of taking private information on patients outside hospitals.

Kowloon East hospital cluster will be the first to invoke the new measures. Cluster Chief Executive Luk Che-chung assured the public that the server will be encrypted to a high state of security.

"It won't be that easy for others to log in. The risk (of losing patients' data) will be low. The only two risks are either the system is attacked by hackers, or the server is accessed by others (unauthorized individuals) after logging on," he added.

Last September the HA committed HK$35 million over the coming two years to protect patients' privacy, acting upon the report of a task force designated to review data security. Setting up a server to store patients' records was one of the suggestions put forward by the task force.

Personal information of over 10,000 patients has been leaked in more than 10 incidents since 2007, most of which involved loss of USB flash drives containing the data.

"The server is what the HA can do within its ability to prevent same incidents," said Leung Ka-lau, lawmaker from the medical constituency.

He addressed concerns that healthcare staff are required to obtain medical records and in most cases, they are not collected in electronic format.

"Healthcare workers are not provided with any suitable tools to collect patients' information, so they record it on paper," he said. "Yet human errors are unavoidable. There may be data loss everyday."

Meanwhile, the budget for enhancing facilities at Kowloon East hospitals will be increased by HK$78 million to HK$3.1 billion this year. Emphasis will be placed on oncology and opthalmology services.

Luk hoped to establish a cancer center to provide coordinated services, from diagnosis to medical treatment, in the cluster.

At present, cancer patients in the cluster are transferred to Queen Elizabeth Hospital to receive electrotherapy.

The cluster has been discussing a suitable location with government officials. The most likely location is at United Christian Hospital.

Since issues such as radioactivity and construction costs must be addressed, Luk estimated the oncology center could take a decade to complete.

(HK Edition 08/04/2009 page1)