Patients in the Houston-based Christus Health Care System have been advised to monitor their credit records after thieves stole two back-up tapes from an employee’s car.
Christus Health Care hasn’t yet determined how many patients are affected, but say the tapes contained names, Social Security numbers, demographic information and some diagnostic codes on hundreds, and maybe thousands, of patients.
All of the patients are those who owe money to CHCS or are making installment payments. Some of the patients may be from outside the Christus system, but all are from Texas, Louisiana, Utah, Arkansas and Mexico.
The employee left the back-up tapes in the car, which was in a Houston parking lot.
A spokeswoman for CHCS said they don’t think the thieves were interested in the information on the back-up tapes, and that it would be very hard to access the information on the tapes.
CHCS officials said they regret that this incident occurred and they have begun new security measures to prevent this from happening in the future. There were no details given about the new security measures.
Police are still investigating the crime.
Since January 2005 almost 250 million records have been exposed in data braches in the United States. Portable devices such as laptop computers, PDAs, flash drives, portable hard drives and tapes are responsible for most data losses.
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