Boston-based Brigham and Women's Hospital is notifying some of its research participants that some of their protected health information may have been posted to a public website.
The health system posted a notice Aug. 4 stating that information collected during the study from 987 participants may have been shared online Jan. 14 and was discovered June 8. The information was inadvertently linked on graphs of research data posted to the website of a data analytics tool called Tableau.
Names, addresses, contact information and medical record numbers were among the information shared.
Clinical information like diagnosis, lab results, medications and procedures may have also been made public, according to the notice.
Brigham and Women's Hospital said they immediately removed the link to the personal information on June 13 after learning of the incident through a review of their workflow process.
The information may have been viewable from Jan. 14 to June 13, according to the notice.
"BWH has taken several steps to mitigate and help prevent incidents like this from occurring in the future, including conducting a review when we discovered the matter and providing privacy and security reminders regarding the use of this tool," the health system wrote.