The second largest health insurer in America, WellPoint Insurance, has agreed to pay a fine of $1.7 million to settle potential violations of healthcare privacy laws. Between October 2009 and March 2010, WellPoint breached the health and personal information protection of 612,402 individuals. The breach was due to a security flaw in an online application database.
Information such as social security numbers, names, addresses, dates of birth, telephone numbers and health information were exposed.
What's even more unfortunate about this issue is how many businesses don't realize they are at risk for this very situation happening to them.
The first case involving the 2009 privacy laws was settled in March 2012: BlueCross/Blue Shield of Tennessee was ordered to pay a fine of $1.5 million.
WellPoint has been cooperative with the review, and has provided credit monitoring and identity theft insurance to individuals affected by their security flaws. There have been no reported cases of identity theft of fraud due to this incident.
"As soon as the situation was discovered in 2010 we made information security changes to prevent it from happening again," said WellPoint Insurance.
The security changes were a smart move, to state the obvious. However, if they had only made the security changes beforehand the entire fiasco would have been avoided.
The good news is that many dental practices still have the opportunity to avoid winding up in WellPoint's shoes by taking the proper precautions. However, recognizing the imminent threat of practicing without ironclad data protection is key.
In fact, WellPoint and BlueCross/BlueShield are no anomalies. A staggering 94% of health care offices suffered at least one data breach in the last year.
However, progress is being made. Services like the soon-to-be-released Practice Byte Guard from The Digital Dentist exist exclusively for dentists to help them avoid the consequences of security breaches.
The problem, of course, is not that today's businesses are actively neglectful, but rather, with the exponential advancement and prevalence of internet technology, hordes of ominous, cryptic, even invisible problems can sneak up on well-intentioned businesses.
Thankfully, as more companies become informed and start actively seeking more proactive ways to protect and advance their chartless offices, security breaches and data loss will, hopefully, be a thing of the past.
