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.

Pamela Tabar

Pamela Tabar was editor-in-chief of I Advance Senior Care from 2013-2018. She has worked as a writer and editor for healthcare business media since 1998, including as News Editor of Healthcare Informatics. She has a master’s degree in journalism from Kent State University and a master’s degree in English from the University of York, England.