And we’re off and running with health insurance exchanges. Jackie Crosby reports:
A MNsure employee accidentally sent an e-mail file to an Apple Valley insurance broker’s office on Thursday that contained Social Security numbers, names, business addresses and other identifying information on more than 2,400 insurance agents.
An official at MNsure, the state’s new online health insurance exchange, acknowledged it had mishandled private data.
Read more on Star Tribune.
I am glad to see that the issue appears to be resolved quickly and I hope other actions, such as ensuring that the email with attachment was also deleted from the broker’s email server, were also taken. Obviously, breaches like this also occur in the private sector. My concerns include 1) improving security awareness training for staff so that they understand the importance of protecting identifying information and, even more importantly, how to protect it and 2) moving forward with the go live of health information exchanges on October 1, 2013 if appropriate security controls are not in place to avoid this situation and similar breaches. In a situation in which people are looking for ways to crucify a program, there should be a great deal of hesitation about moving forward before the exchanges are ready due to potentially making the program a very easy target for defunding/elimination. Moving forward merely to meet a deadline, especially when other prior deadlines have been changed, could also have the appearance of politics as usual.
I am also very concerned about the enormous target that an online federal hub will be for hackers who intend to misuse identifying data. On a similar note, I have told my husband for years that they could not pay me enough to be the CIO for a Health Information Organization due to the hacking target I believe they could be. God bless the people who are willing to take on tough security challenges!