One way to protect healthcare organizations from cyberattacks is to implement multiple layers of protections that are backed by systems to detect hackers before they are able to breach a company’s defenses, according to FierceHealthIT.
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“Out of abundance of caution and in transparency, we are disclosing an ongoing search for the hard drives”, CEO Michael Neidorff said in a regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Neidorff said the hard drives were part of a data project using laboratory results “to improve the health outcomes of our members”.
But no financial or payment details of customers were on the drives, it said. The data in the hard disks comprise name, address and date of birth, along with social security number, member ID number and information relating to health.
The parent company of Sunshine Health, which handles Medicaid plans for the state of Florida, said Tuesday it was missing six hard drives that contain the personal and health information of roughly 950,000 clients.
Notification to affected individuals will include an offer of free credit and healthcare monitoring.
The lost data comes as Centene is seeking to buy HealthNet for $6.8 billion.
The firm said it doesn’t believe the information has been used inappropriately.
In a press release, Centene said the hard drives the company is trying to find contain personal information of people who received lab services from 2009-2015.
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Similar attacks on Anthem and Blue Cross in 2015 saw 80 million and 11 million records lost, respectively.
