Physical Wellness

Centene's Hard Drive Containing 950, 000 Medical Records Missing

By Jenn Loro | Update Date: Jan 27, 2016 10:34 AM EST

St. Louis-based managed-care and Fortune 500 health insurance giant Centene Corporation is currently in the process of retrieving six lost computer hard drives containing sensitive personal database and health records of its 950, 000 clients.

However, the company strongly maintained that the missing computer-saved information do not contain extremely important details such as financial and payment records of its almost a million customers.

"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," remarked Centene CEO Michael Neidorff as quoted in the Centene's official news release.

Furthermore, Neidorff vows to secure the missing records critical in the company's ongoing efforts of enhancing healthcare outcomes of its nearly a million-strong members as mentioned in a report by the Reuters.

The publicly traded company has notified the Securities and Exchange Commission of its retrieval efforts in a regulatory filing with the said government agency.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the lost records on the missing hard drives include clients' names, addresses, dates of birth, member ID numbers Social Security numbers, and a plethora of unspecified health information for customers who received laboratory services in various Centene-accredited facilities from 2009 to 2015.

To allay widespread fears of possible security breaches and restore public confidence, the company also said that in an official statement it is "in the process of reinforcing and reviewing its procedures related to managing its IT assets" as stated in an article published in Modern Healthcare.

As a compensation for the much publicized trouble, clients are entitled to "free credit and healthcare monitoring", the company's official news release said.

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