A missing CD containing confidential medical and personal information on 75,000 Empire Blue Cross and Blue Shield members was recovered Wednesday.
Erin Sommers, a spokeswoman for Magellan Behavioral Services, a managed care company that monitors payments for mental health and substance abuse cases of insurers, said the company received a telephone call Wednesday morning saying that the CD was delivered by mistake to a residence in the Philadelphia area. The CD had been missing since January.
Magellan sent two security employees to identify the CD, interview the people who received it and bring it back. "We have no reason to believe, based on our interviews, that there was any improper access to the evidence," Sommers said.
The recipients were assembling a new audio system when they found the Magellan disc among the packages, she said.
The coding and password protection for the information on the CD, which included the names of patients, their doctors, hospitals, Social Security numbers and medical claims going back to 2003, had been removed by the sender, Health Data Management Solutions, a company working for Magellan, Sommers said.
Health Data Management Solutions is a unit of ActiveHealth Management, a data management company owned by the Aetna insurance company. Health Data and Magellan staff members "had agreed to exchange the data in an unencrypted manner," ActiveHealth spokeswoman Oonagh Holt said.
