The HSE has paused the issuing of plastic medical cards, European Health Insurance Cards (EHIC), GP visit cards, drugs payment scheme cards, and long-term illness cards following a cyber-attack on the systems of an external provider of card-printing services.<\/p>\n
The HSE said its systems were not compromised but it is understood that a small number of HSE records were accessed.<\/p>\n
Earlier, the HSE said it had reported the incident to the Data Protection Commission and was assessing the “need to notify individuals whose data may have been impacted”.<\/p>\n
A spokesperson for the Data Protection Commission said it has received a breach notification.<\/p>\n
“The breach is currently being assessed,” the spokesperson said.<\/p>\n
The Irish Patients’ Association said regardless of the number of records involved in the data breach, every patient whose information was accessed deserves to know.<\/p>\n
“Outsourcing a service does not outsource responsibility,” said Stephen McMahon, Chairman, Irish Patients’ Association.<\/p>\n
“The HSE remains accountable for protecting patients’ personal information, regardless of who provides the service.<\/p>\n
“The HSE says healthcare services have not been affected, which is reassuring.<\/p>\n
“Now it must be equally transparent about what happened, what data was involved, and what steps are being taken to prevent it happening again,” Mr McMahon said.<\/p>\n
The HSE said that applicants for cards will receive a letter confirming their eligibility for the relevant scheme, which can be used as proof of eligibility as needed.<\/p>\n
“Provisional Replacement Certificates providing the same entitlement to healthcare while abroad are being provided instead of plastic EHIC cards,” the HSE said.<\/p>\n
“EHIC cards for adults are available through the HSE Health App which can be downloaded through the App Store and Google Play,” it added.<\/p>\n
According to the HSE, all service providers, including GPs and pharmacies, normally use a digital channel to verify eligibility for any scheme, and as a result, there is no impact on access to healthcare services.<\/p>\n
The HSE said the processing of applications for medical cards, and other health service schemes, is managed directly by the HSE and people’s eligibility is not affected.<\/p>\n
“There is no impact on access to healthcare services, applications for medical cards, EHIC cards and other health service schemes are being processing as normal,” a spokesperson said.<\/p>\n
The HSE said that once it was alerted by the external provider, its cyber security protocols were immediately activated.<\/p>\n
“The HSE takes all breaches of data protection seriously and manages all breaches in line with data protection legislation and HSE policy,” a spokesperson said.<\/p>\n
Details of the cyber-attack were first reported by RT\u00c9 Raidi\u00f3 na Gaeltachta.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The HSE has paused the issuing of plastic medical cards, European Health Insurance Cards (EHIC), GP visit cards,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":542751,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-542750","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/542750","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=542750"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/542750\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/542751"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=542750"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=542750"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=542750"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}