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Personal Info Of 2,000 UPMC Patients Compromised By Vendor Employee

UPTOWN (KDKA) – Personal information, including names, birthdates and social security numbers for more than 2,000 UPMC patients have been compromised.

The healthcare giant says it was an employee of one of their medical vendors who stole information.

The company is Medical Management, LLC.

They provide billing services for UPMC and other healthcare providers. The employee, who worked at a call center, has been fired and a federal investigation is underway.

Medical Management notified UPMC that the names, dates of birth and social security numbers of about 2,200 patients who visited the emergency departments at various UPMC locations over the past two years may have been illegally disclosed.

According to a UPMC release, the Medical Management employee copied the personal information from the billing system and then gave it to a third party.

"I guess it's kind of wrong, I guess," said one UPMC patient. "I don't know what he'd be needing all that information for."

UPMC released a statement apologizing for the incident. It reads, in part, "We hold our vendors to the same high privacy standards that we have for ourselves. Based upon the ongoing investigation, we will make whatever changes might be necessary to further enhance our already stringent privacy protections."

Marty Linder, an engineer at Carnegie Mellon's software engineering institute CERT division says these days it's imperative that everyone get identity and fraud protection.

"This is just going to continue on and on and on and the two piece of advice are one, buy the protection. And number two is, limit every extent possible, where you share information," he said.

There's no information that the medical history or treatment methods for any of the patients were disclosed. Medical Management will provide identity theft protection for the patients who were affected by the data breach.

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