Delta Dental of Illinois has notified hundreds of people about an incident that could result in the exposure of their personal information.
A box containing paper claims was shipped by a subcontractor of Delta Dental of Illinois to the company by a delivery service. The box, which contained claims and X-rays, was lost during shipping.
Neither Delta Dental’s benefit processing system nor electronic data was compromised, according to the company.
Some of the enrollees’ personal information may have been included in the paperwork, depending on what their dentist provided on the claim. Information, such as the person’s date of birth or Social Security number, could have been on the documents.
Delta Dental of Illinois, based in Naperville, is the administrator of the dental plan for state employees. According to a spokesperson, about 650 individuals in Illinois were affected by the incident; about six of them are university or state employees in the Champaign-Urbana area.
Read more on The News-Gazette. The incident is not yet posted on HHS’s breach tool so the name of the contractor and subcontractor is not known at this time.
Delta Dental was involved in another breach early last year that raised questions about who was responsible for notifying patients and states after a laptop and disk with patient data was stolen from an expert involved in litigation involving The Smile Center patients Additional coverage of that breach can be found here.
In a separate incident, Delta Dental of California reported that over 11,000 patients were affected by a breach that occurred in December 2011.