Despite its having been "scrubbed," a laptop formerly belonging to Intermountain Health Care apparently still contained a file with personnel data on 6,000 employees who worked for Intermountain in 1999. The provider's human-resources department donated an old laptop to a charity, and somehow, no one realized that the file was still accessible on the laptop's hard drive. The rogue file provided information of great potential value to an identity thief, including names, social security numbers, telephone numbers and job titles. Fortunately for the employees, the man who bought the laptop--and the personnel data--discovered the file and voluntarily returned the laptop to Intermountain. Intermountain has since notified its 27,000 active employees, as well as 3,400 previous employees, that the data had been stolen. Intermountain is offering credit monitoring to any employee that requests it. This is one of a few recent incidents in which healthcare organizations have had laptop data loss problems. Most recently, Allina Health System lost a laptop [1] with thousands of patient Social Security numbers and other data when it was stolen from a nurse's car.
To learn more about the data theft:
- read this article [2] from the Deseret Morning News
Related Articles:
VA pledges better data security. Report [3]
Links:
[1] http://www.fiercehealthit.com/story/allina-suffers-patient-data-theft/2006-10-23
[2] http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,650203974,00.html
[3] http://www.fiercehealthcare.com/story/va-pledges-better-data-security/2006-06-28