BCBS of Tennessee Notifying Members After Patient Information Stolen

In the past several weeks, Thompson says BCBST has had as many as 800 people—including employees from a private security company—working at any given time on the arduous task of analyzing more than 300,000 screen shots and about 50,000 hours of audio data to identify potential breaches.

"You have to cross reference what was being said at the time the screen shot was captured," Thompson says. "We are going through all of those and as we are identifying groups we are triaging them based on who had a Social Security number and any of the data that was stolen. The next level down would be those who had a diagnostic code. The third level down would be those with a name or address and date of birth."

The burglary occurred on a Friday afternoon, but BCBST did not discover the theft until the following Monday morning.

"Because the data on the drives were only used for training purposes, it wasn't essential to daily operations," Thomson says. "The person in charge of the servers did not service them over the weekend because they weren't going to harm any service providers or members. It wasn't until Monday morning when they went to the data storage closet when they realized they weren't there."

Questions about the theft or other privacy matters may be directed to the BCBST Privacy Office Hotlines at 1-888-422-2786 or 1-888-455-3824 or Privacy_Office@bcbst.com.