The Heartland Health Region is in the process of trying to come up with a set of recommendations to address a serious privacy breach where an employee inappropriately viewed the personal health information of 883 patients.

Greg Cummings, CEO and president of Heartland Health Region, said an investigation into the incident is still ongoing and they do not want to jump to a conclusion before the whole analysis is completed. He said the region needs to take action to understand what happened and why it happened, so from a “root cause analysis” they can decide what actions are needed in order to prevent it from occurring again.

“It obviously indicates that there’s a weakness in our ability to audit these kinds of actions by employees in real time,” said Cummings. “We clearly need to tighten up our auditing and security measures, but the problem even with that is that we know that’s something that happens after the fact. It’s too late by the time you’ve caught somebody via an audit, so there will be other things that we will need to do to ensure that employees are well aware of their responsibilities.”

Cummings said the region’s investigation first involved a look into the affected system to see all of the people who accessed the system and the number of times a health record has been viewed. He said then through a closer examination they were able to discover whether or not the person who was looking at the information had a legitimate reason for doing so.

“A legitimate reason would be that the care provider is part of the team that is working with the particular patient and was looking at the record in order to have the right information to be able to deliver appropriate and safe care,” he said. “In this case we found that the employee looked at a lot of information that the employee had no legitimate reason to be viewing.”

The information viewed was electronic records related to the diagnostic imaging (X-rays) department and the person who viewed the information was an employee in this department at this time. Heartland Health Region’s X-rays in most of their sites are done digitally and sent electronically and employees access the information through an electronic Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS).

Personal information collected by PACS includes a patient’s name, address, phone number, date of birth, health services number as well as information about the type of diagnostic imaging exam, clinical results and the physician’s name.

Cummings said what the offence committed comes down to is “snooping” and they do not know what the employee’s motivation was. He said the region has since dealt with the employee “accordingly” for their actions.

To read more please see the November 4 print edition of The Davidson Leader.

For the past nine months a University of Saskatchewan research group has been monitoring 17 adult female moose that live in the area along Highway 11 between Dundurn and Chamberlain to try to gain a better understanding of their tendencies.

Ryan Brook, moose project director and assistant professor in the U of S College of Agriculture and Bioresources, said there has been a “few hiccups” with some of the GPS collars they put around each moose’s neck last February, but they have still been able to keep tracking those few with VHF radio signals. He said the research group also went on the ground in June and September to check on each female to see if she had calves.

“We saw in the spring there was on average 0.85 calves per cow,” said Brook. “It’s a little less than one-to-one on average, but we did see a number of twins as well and a few that had none.

“These animals can live for a long time. If they’re producing almost one calf per female then that certainly suggests a potential for real growth in the population.”

Brook said these moose are up and moving around a lot right now due to harvest activities, hunting season and the rut. He said with the moose breeding season males are paired up with females making these animals mobile and active, which is pretty consistently the time when the most moose-vehicle collisions occur.

“Because we only have adult females we don’t have a representation of the whole population and, of course, we only have a small sample of what’s there,” he said. “Some of the animals that we are monitoring have been crossing the highway quite regularly. We (have) one that is crossing almost every second day for the last little while…and is currently sitting probably about 200 metres from Hwy. 11, so that one is obviously a very risky one.

“That one is just north of Bladworth and hasn’t gone more than 300 metres away from Highway 11 in the last two weeks, so that one is a very heavy concern.”

The majority of the moose crossings happen at 3 a.m. or 4 a.m. when visibility is at its lowest. Moose are also especially hard to spot from a vehicle because they have long legs, are a dark brown or chocolate brown colour and don’t always look at a vehicle so a motorist wouldn’t see their eyes.

Brook said one of the things the group is interested in looking at further is why moose are sticking around the highway. He said they think the main things are moose are attracted to road salt, there is lots of wetland, shrubbery and tree cover along the highway and staying close to the road helps them avoid hunters.

“They’re right near Hwy. 11 with all the traffic and you’re not allowed to discharge a firearm across a road or a highway, so being close to a highway may be a partial safety factor from hunters,” he said. “Predators in this general area between Saskatoon and Regina are probably not much if any wolves and very few bears, so we’re not sure if predation really plays a role here. The only predator of significance is coyotes and it’s not clear as to whether coyotes play any kind of real role or impact for moose. Predation risk may not be a real concern for these moose, but certainly hunting pressure is.”

To read more please see the October 28 print edition of The Davidson Leader.