Officials at Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor say a hard drive containing personal information on 660 patients has gone missing from the hospital after construction.
EMMC President Donna Russell-Cook says the drive doesn’t have the kind of information that could easily enable ID theft.
“There is no — I repeat no — Social Security number, no financial information, no addresses would be located in that. We understand the concern that patients may have but we feel the risk is very low,” she says.
EMMC Vice President for Compliance and Privacy Eric Hafener says the information on the drive is not missing as a result.
“The medical information that was on the drive is backup data. We already have the information in other locations around the hospital, it was just being backed up on to the hard drive,” he says.
The drive contains patient names, dates of service, one-word descriptions of their conditions and pictures of their hearts.
The drive, which is a little bigger than a large cellphone, went missing from a cardiac procedure room in late December after construction. EMMC knows whose data is on the drive and has sent letters to all the people who are affected. It has also posted information on Facebook and its website.
The hospital says it’s still working with law enforcement to find the drive, which went missing in late December. It’s offering to pay for identity theft monitoring services for a year.
