| News From Transplant Week of January 20, 2002 / Vol. 3 No. 3 |
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U of Minnesota Mistakenly Reveals 410 Transplant Donor Names |
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University of Minnesota researchers have committed a serious violation of patient confidentiality by mistakenly revealing the names of deceased donors to 410 kidney transplant recipients. The mistake occurred following a software upgrade to a database of 5,000 University of Minnesota transplant patients started in 1988, which includes information about recipients as well as the identity of their donors -- both living and deceased. Dr. Arthur Matas, who oversees the database, is lead investigator on a long-term study designed to gather information on the health of living-donor kidney transplant recipients and living donors. Each year, the university sends out the same letter to 1,200 patients -- two-thirds of whom received kidneys from living donors -- asking them the same questions. While the letter to the patients contains the names of their living donor, the software is supposed to withhold the names of the deceased donors. When the letters were generated in December, the program included all donor names. The error was discovered after a patient who had received a kidney from a dead donor called to ask whether the name was, in fact, the donor's. "It clearly is a breach," said Susan Gunderson, chief executive officer of LifeSource, the organ procurement organization in Minnesota. Confidentiality is promised to all donor families, she said, "and is a core component of the donation process." "Everybody feels terrible," said Matas. Richard Bianco, the university's vice president of regulatory affairs, said the names of deceased donors have now been removed from the database. Other sources: Star-Tribune |
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