14 DAY TRIAL // As much as 750 University of Missouri (UM) employees had their personal information exposed after their health benefit statements were delivered to the wrong addresses earlier this month.
The data breach incident occurred between January 6th and 10th, and was caused by a computer error at Coventry Health Care, the company administering the university’s health insurance plans.
UM learned of the problem on January 14 when one of its employees alerted it about receiving someone else's health benefit statement, health services letter and new ID card.
The university raised the problem with Coventry, which on January 20 confirmed that a computer malfunctioned and aligned names with the wrong addresses.
UM began notifying affected employees the following day, warning them to carefully review their future statements and advising them to ask health providers to confirm the identity of individuals seeking services under their insurance numbers.
"We are clearly concerned by this, as the privacy of health plan participants’ information is of the utmost importance to us," said Kelley Stuck, who oversees UM faculty and staff benefits programs.
"We have asked Coventry to take steps to attempt to recover the misdirected mail, and we have provided participants affected by this error with steps they can take to protect themselves," she added.
The data breach involved names, member numbers and birth dates of Choice Health Care Program members. Participants in the Catastrophic Medical Program or the Retiree Indemnity Medical Program were not affected, and the exposed information did not include Social Security numbers.
The delivery of sensitive information to wrong recipients is not uncommon. In October last year, Telstra, the largest telecom provider in Australia misdelivered 220,000 letters exposing customer names and phone numbers.
In November, a Seton Hall University employee inadvertently emailed an Excel spreadsheet with the personal and educational information of 1,500 seniors to 400 other students.