Medicare Compliance & Reimbursement
Payer Misplaces PHI of Nearly One Million Patients
Your practice would be in quite a bind if it misplaced the protected health information (PHI) of 950 patients — now multiply that number tenfold, and that’s the issue facing health insurer Centene.
The payer announced this week that it is missing six hard drives that held the PHI of about 950,000 patients. Although Centene stressed that the information does not appear to have been used inappropriately and that it doesn’t include any financial information, the insurer did note that the hard drives contain names, addresses, dates of birth, Social Security numbers and other identifiers of patients who underwent lab services from 2009 to 2015.
“Centene takes the privacy and security of our members’ information seriously,” said Centene CEO Michael F. Neidorff in a Jan. 25 statement. “While we don’t believe this information has been used inappropriately, out of abundance of caution and in transparency, we are disclosing an ongoing search for the hard drives.” The company is also offering free credit and healthcare monitoring to the impacted patients.
Medicare Compliance & Reimbursement
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Payer Misplaces PHI of Nearly One Million Patients
Your practice would be in quite a bind if it misplaced the protected health [...]
