Several CDs containing personal information about tens of thousands of members of CalOptima, the Medicaid plan for Orange County, Calif., recently went missing.
How many victims? 68,000.
What type of personal information? Names, addresses, Social Security numbers, diagnoses and billing codes.
What happened? The CDs went missing in transit after they were shipped from a claims scanning vendor to CalOptima through the U.S. Postal service by certified mail, the agency said. The package the CDs were shipped in was received but when it arrived, the disks were missing.
Details: The data on the disks was unencrypted.
What was the response? Affected members will be offered free credit monitoring. In addition, an investigation into the incident is underway.
Source: Consumer Affairs, consumeraffairs.com, “68,000 CalOptima Members at Risk in Data Breach,” Oct. 30, 2009.
