L.A. Care Health Plan, the largest public health plan in the country, is notifying some members whose personal information may have been exposed to other members due to a glitch in their online payment portal.
In a letter to those affected, Veronica Richardson, Privacy & Information Security Officer for L.A. Health Plan writes:
We are sending you this letter to inform you of an information processing error that may have involved accidental disclosure of your information. On January 24, 2014, we became aware that some L.A. Care Covered members who logged onto our payment portal were able to see another member’s name, address and member identification number.
Upon learning of this issue we temporarily disabled the payment portal and promptly began to investigate the issue. We were able to confirm that the disclosures took place between January 22, 2014 to January 24, 2014 and were the result of a manual information processing error which we have since corrected. We were also able to confirm that the information disclosed was limited to member name, address and member identification number and did not include any other information, such as Social Security number, Driver’s License number, or financial account numbers.
The plan is issuing new member ID numbers and sending replacement membership cards with the new numbers.