It would have been just another run of the mill car break in, except this particular violated car belongs to a home-health care employee from St. Rita’s Medical Center in Lima, Ohio. In the car was a bag, and in the bag was the personal and medical information of 242 St. Rita’s patients.
So, what this means is that somewhere there is a cretin who is in possession of the patients’ names, addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, patient ID numbers. For some patients the identity theft threat is even greater because their Social Security numbers were also in the stolen bag. And for some, the privacy violation is even worse because their case managers’ and physician’s names and the details of their treatment were also stolen.
Let’s try to make something positive and hopeful of this, shall we?
One lesson we can all take away from this despicable crime is that identity theft and privacy violations can happen to anyone and in myriad manners. We can’t trust the people storing our information to safeguard it responsibly, so we must proactively protect ourselves, even if it means availing ourselves of professional expertise like that of identity theft protection services.
And, we can hope that St. Rita’s has also learned from what will no doubt be an expensive lesson. First of all, their employee should never have been carrying around the files of 242 patients; surely she wasn’t planning to see them all in a single day, so the excess files should have been stored securely in her office.
Secondly, those files should have been digitized, encrypted and stored on a password-protected laptop. Thousands upon thousands of laptops are stolen every year, but few low-life criminals have the skills to access the data within them.
Visit LifeLock.com to learn more about your options for protecting your identity. If you decide to enroll in their program, use the LifeLock promotion code DEFENSE for the lowest price and 30 days of free service.
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Tags: avoid identity theft, Data breach, Identity Theft, LifeLock promotion code, lifelock.com, St. Rita's Medical Center
They’re probably no worse than any of the others, and maybe better than most — a scary thought!