Blue Cross warns of physician data exposure

The Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association (BCBSA) has begun re-evaluating its security policies after a laptop containing sensitive BCBSA data concerning physicians was stolen in August from an employee’s car.

The laptop contained information from BCBSA’s provider data repository, which included names, addresses, tax IDs and provider IDs of physicians participating in the National Blue Card program.

“A BCBSA employee broke protocol and transferred to a personal laptop info from our provider data repository,” said Jeff Smokler, executive director of external affairs for BCBSA, in an e-mail.

According to Smokler, there are more than 800,000 physicians nationwide that participate in the National Blue Card program.

“About 16-20 percent of those docs in the database use their SSN as their ID, so for those docs, that info was included as well,” stated Smokler. “There was no personal health information on the database.”

Currently, BCBSA has found no evidence of data misuse and believes the act was random, according to Smokler. 

“Regardless, we take these kinds of breaches extremely seriously and so we are alerting all doctors in the database. We also are providing one year of free credit monitoring,” he said.