Health system discloses breach tied to online data tracker

By KATHLEEN FOODY
The Associated Press

CHICAGO (AP) — The personal health information of up to 3 million patients in Illinois and Wisconsin may have been exposed to outside companies through tracking technology used on a large hospital system’s electronic health records website. Advocate Aurora Health, which operates 27 hospitals, said in a statement Thursday that the breach may have exposed information including patients’ medical provider, type of appointment or medical procedure, dates and locations of scheduled appointments and IP address. The system blamed the breach on its use of pixels _ computer code that collects information on how a user interacts with a website _ including products developed by Google and Facebook’s parent company Meta.