Nova Scotia needs to toughen the governance over medical-related databases held by the public and private sectors, the province's information and privacy commissioner says in her annual report.
"There is an urgent need to strengthen and clarify the responsibilities for and monitoring of interoperable health information databases to protect the privacy of Nova Scotians' health information," Catherine Tully said in the report released this morning.
A separate investigation into the staff abusing their access privileges within the Nova Scotia Health Authority (NSHA), which oversees a number of hospitals in the province, found unauthorized access of 335 individual medical records by six different staff at multiple worksites. "Our investigation revealed a dangerous and insidious culture of entitlement to view health records, with accounts of unauthorized access that, in some cases, took place over a long period of time," Tully noted.
access. A new fully-integrated electronic records access control system is expected to be added by the end of 2020.
She also repeated her call for the province to update its privacy law to comply with the European Union's new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). "The standards set by the GDPR will increasingly become standards expected around the world," Tully noted.