Queenstown Medical Centre (QMC) will phase in a new patient portal from next Friday to replace its hacked Manage My Health (MMH) app.
CEO Ashley Light says it’s chosen New Zealand-based Vensa Health Ltd, because it best meets QMC’s cyber security requirements.
Vensa will begin inviting QMC patients to sign up to its web browser-based portal on March 20.
They’ll be able to choose their own privacy settings on the app, such as whether to use it only to make appointments, or to get full access to their medical notes.
Light says Vensa uses the Azure Microsoft cloud platform for data storage, which is ‘‘about as secure as you’re going to get’’, and the app is much more user-friendly than MMH.
QMC’s one of more than 350 GP practices in NZ affected by a cyber security breach on December 29 that affected more than 120,000 people.
After a hacker group known as Kazu accessed hundreds of thousands of files from MMH, it demanded a ransom of about $100,000.
The company was granted a High Court injunction preventing anyone from accessing or sharing the stolen data.
In a newsletter to patients this week, QMC says it followed MMH’s instructions to disable the flow of patients’ consultation notes and lab result data to the portal after the breach.
However, it later learned the data flow has continued because the instructions were incorrect.
The only way to stop the data flow is by patients closing their MMH accounts, or by QMC disconnecting from the portal — which it’ll do on April 9.
Light says the hack’s been a ‘‘wake-up call’’ to all health providers in NZ, public and private, not only GP clinics.
The switch to Vensa has been a major cost to QMC’s business, but ‘‘wasn’t a difficult decision’’.
‘‘We've put significant time and resources into making the decision, and getting the right contracts in place.
‘‘But we think it was the right thing to do for our patients, because MMH clearly wasn't meeting our requirements, our patients’ requirements or cyber security requirements.’’
