Medicaid insurer loses data on 950k beneficiaries

Centene Corp, a St. Louis-based Medicaid health plan manager, has apparently lost track of six hard drives containing personal information on about 950,000 beneficiaries, the company announced Monday. The company has launched an internal investigation to locate the drives, which the company couldn’t account for on an IT inventory.

The drives contained member IDs and payment information for Medicaid beneficiaries who had received certain laboratory services. No evidence of data misuse has been reported to date, and the company has not called the incident a theft.

“While we don't believe this information has been used inappropriately, out of abundance of caution and in transparency, we are disclosing an ongoing search for the hard drives,” said President and CEO Michael Neidorff in the corporate announcement. “The drives were a part of a data project using laboratory results to improve the health outcomes of our members."

Centene is offering free credit monitoring for those affected.

 


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