Stolen Medical Data
A file containing identifying information for every physician in the country contracted with a Blues-affiliated insurance plan was on a laptop computer stolen from a BlueCross BlueShield Assn. employee. It is not yet known whether any identity theft has resulted from the data breach.
The file included the name, address, tax identification number and national provider identifier number for about 850,000 doctors, Jeff Smokler, spokesman for the Chicago-based Blues association, said Oct. 6.
This article highlights some of the vagaries of living in such a technology dependent world. While technology certainly has the capacity to rapidly make things better, it can also rapidly make things worse. just think for a moment, how many sheets of paper it would take to store 850,000 people’s personal identification? It would probably be hard for one person to make off with that kind of data in one instant years ago. Now that data can be copied to a flash drive and be gone in seconds.
Obviously the data in this case wasn’t encrypted and a dishonest employee was involved. And I am in no way advocating going back to paper. But it just makes you think about how efficiency cuts both ways and risk actually amplifies as complexity grows in systems.
