WellPoint, Blue Cross May Have Lost Medical Data
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Blue Cross Blue Shield is not going to be asking what Brown can do for it anytime soon.
It seems a CD with personal and medical information on 75,000 clients of WellPoint has disappeared. WellPoint, is an independent licensee of Blue's New York unit, Empire Blue Cross Blue Shield. It's making the uncomfortable calls to members that their social security numbers as well as account numbers, addresses, names and other personal information disappeared when the uncrypted CD was sent to a subcontractor to coordinate medical services. No one knows whether the information, sent via UPS, was stolen or just lost.
Janlori Goldman, the director of the Health Privacy Center, a nonprofit organization in Washington, said the error was "an egregious breach of privacy." She said that insurance companies were responsible under a federal privacy law for ensuring that their contractors use adequate security procedures.
Luckily, passwords were removed from the data.
This is the second breech of security in five month. WellPoint lost data on 196,000 members stored in a warehouse. That theft has not been solved.
Members will receive a year of free credit reporting. And in the future -- data will be sent through a secure network electronically.
WellPoint serves 34 million people and licenses Blue Cross Blue Shield in more than a dozen states. Florida is not among them.