Moffitt Cancer Center chief reveals breach

Posted Aug 27, 2010 by Lindsay Peterson

Updated Sep 2, 2010 at 10:01 AM

Moffitt Cancer Center CEO William Dalton asked this week for an audience with the Tribune editorial board and laid out an odd story of how a worker had falsified a patient consent form for a cancer research project.

You can read it here

No one except the worker knows why, and he gave no explanation. We don’t have his name.

It was troubling because he had worked at Moffitt for more than two years, asking patients if they would allow researchers to track the progress of their cancer treatment. The project is called Total Cancer Care.

So Moffitt brought in a handwriting expert and examined the records of all 6,464 patients who had been enrolled in the project. Turns out, 492 looked suspicious.

The problem is that if any researchers had looked into records they didn’t have permission to see, it could be a violation of federal privacy law.

Moffitt, which is on the University of South Florida campus though independent of USF, is getting in touch with all 492 to determine if they actually signed the consents and want to be in or out of the study.

Chances are one of them will tell someone, who may tell someone else, who will contact TBO.com, Newschannel 8 or the Tribune. But when that happens it will be old news, not a scandal story about wrong-doing and coverups at the state’s top cancer center.

That’s because Dalton told us about it himself.