About 800,000 doctors -- nearly every practicing physician in the country -- are being warned that business and personal information such as Social Security numbers, addresses and certain identification numbers may be open for a possible breach after an insurance trade group employee's laptop was stolen from a car in Chicago.
The Chicago-based Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association, a trade group for the nation's Blue Cross health insurance plans, confirmed an employee "broke protocol and transferred to a personal laptop" information that was later stolen in late August.
No patient information was on the database, so concern by consumers having personal health records breached is unwarranted, the association said. And doctors have not reported security breaches. About 16 to 20 percent of the doctors listed in the database have their Social Security numbers as their medical-care provider identification, putting these health professionals at risk for identity theft.
The information transferred to the association employee's personal laptop was from the association's medical care "provider data repository," which includes names, addresses, and provider identification numbers of physicians that are used by insurance companies to pay doctors.
"At this point, we have no evidence that the data was misused," said Jeff Smokler, spokesman for the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association, which represents 39 Blue Cross and Blue Shield companies that provide health coverage for 100 million Americans. "We think this was a random criminal act. Regardless, we take these kinds of breaches extremely seriously and so we are alerting all doctors in the database."
Doctor groups across the country, including the American Medical Association, have been notifying medical care providers across the country about the potential for a breach.
"The data is used in performing internal matching analyses to compare Blue Cross and Blue Shield provider networks to the networks of other health plans for employer groups," AMA President Dr. James Rohack said in a statement being distributed to physicians this week.
The AMA also said physicians should not worry that the theft of the data was intended to steal doctor identities.
"The data set was stored on a laptop that was stolen from a car, which was one of several cars in the immediate vicinity that were vandalized," Rohack said. "There is no reason to believe that the thief intends to use the data to commit identity theft. However, as a precaution, BCBSA is offering credit monitoring services to those providers whose Social Security number was exposed."
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