Anthem Hit with Data Breach of 18,580 Medicare Members

Anthem recently learned that 18,580 of its Medicare members may have been victims of identity theft, after its third-party coordination services vendor LaunchPoint Ventures discovered an employee had emailed a file containing the sensitive information to his personal email account.

The Anthem file contained Medicare ID numbers, which also includes social security numbers, Health Plan ID numbers, Medicare contract numbers, dates of enrollment, and, in some cases, the last names and dates of birth of the members. LaunchPoint, which hired a forensics company to investigate the breach, currently does not have any information that the pilfered data was misused, according to Anthem.

On April 12, LaunchPoint discovered one of its employees was allegedly engaged in identity theft activities and hired a forensics company. Then on July 8, LaunchPoint discovered the employee had emailed the Anthem file to his personal account, which violated LaunchPoint's policies. The company learned the file contained Protected Health Information (PHI) on July 12 and two days later it reported the breach to Anthem.

LaunchPoint terminated the employee and is working with law enforcement to look into the matter. In the meantime, the former employee is incarcerated and under investigation for an unrelated issue, LaunchPoint noted.

Read more about the Anthem breach here.