In the successive events, Oregon Health Insurance Exchange suffered 18
Library at Oregon Health & Science University, in Portland, Oregon. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
security breaches in past six months. The recent incident involved documents with PHI being sent to wrong patient. Cover Oregon spokeswoman Ariane Holm said the breach is under investigation. The exchange’s security team with a return envelope was immediately sent to Migliaccio who got the other patients information.
“We take the security and privacy or our customers very seriously and have policies and trainings in place to protect personally identifiable information of our consumers,” Holm told the news source, adding Cover Oregon regularly improves procedures.
According to the Associated Press, Ann Migliaccio applied for health coverage through Cover Oregon and then received documents in the mail containing the names and birth dates of two other applicants. However, Migliaccio told the news source that the documents did not include Social Security number. Affected information included addresses, names, dates of birth and internal Cover Oregon IDs.
“It was pretty shocking,” Migliaccio said. “But with Cover Oregon nothing is shocking anymore. They should be very thankful I’m an honest person and I will not try to use this information.”
When applicants need to update their applications, the exchange no longer mails the completed documents that include Social Security numbers and other information. Earlier, Cover Oregon was working with Oracle Corp. to create an HIE for the state but it missed the deadlines and individuals were required to use a hybrid paper-online application process.
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