More N.W.T. medical records faxed to CBC

More confidential health-care records from Northwest Territories health authorities have been faxed in error to the CBC, a month after a similar gaffe raised concerns about confidentiality breaches.

Two separate sets of patient files were mistakenly faxed to the CBC's Yellowknife newsroom on June 18:

• A patient's prescription record, faxed by the Yellowknife Health and Social Services Authority.
• A document about someone's meeting with a wellness counsellor, sent by the Fort Smith Health and Social Services Authority in Fort Smith, N.W.T.

In both cases, health officials cited manual dialing errors as the cause of the misdirected faxes.

"We suspect that there was a mis-keying of the first three [digits] of the number," Ruth Robertson, CEO of the Yellowknife Health and Social Services Authority, told CBC News.

Robert Tordiff, the CEO of the Fort Smith Health and Social Services Authority, said he questioned his staff after CBC News contacted him about the wellness counsellor document.

"Based on the information that we received, through that investigation we were able to conclude that there was a dialling error," Tordiff said.

Reviewing policies

Human error was also cited last month by health officials in Norman Wells, N.W.T., after pages of blood test and Pap test results were erroneously sent to CBC Yellowknife's newsroom fax machine.

In that case, the documents were supposed to go to the health centre in Old Crow, Yukon. The Sahtu Health and Social Services Authority said it would review its policy for faxing confidential medical information in light of the incident.

Last month, officials with both the Yellowknife and Stanton health authorities said they phone intended recipients before and after faxes are sent to make sure the documents are received.

But the Yellowknife and Fort Smith authorities were not aware the latest faxes had gone astray until CBC News phoned them.

"There is always the element of human error and it's been the challenge, I think, across the country with when we're looking at faxing information," Robertson said.

"I believe certainly internally, the next steps for us will be to look again at our guidelines."

N.W.T. privacy commissioner Elaine Keenan Bengts had called last month's medical fax error an "eye-opener" for health-care facilities across the territory.

Robertson said she hopes this kind of mistake does not happen again, once the N.W.T.'s electronic medical record sharing system is up and running.