More than 2,800 patients at University of New Mexico Hospital in Albuquerque received notification of a data breach after a technical issue with hospital billing systems caused medical information to be mailed to incorrect addresses.
Thirty-three invoice documents were mistakenly mailed to 18 addresses between Dec. 22 and April 2, the hospital reports. In total, 2,827 patient names were compromised.
Potentially exposed information includes patient names, provider names, service dates and a description of medical services. No financial information, health insurance information, treatment information, birth dates, Social Security numbers or medical record numbers were included in the documents, according to the hospital.
"UNMHospital is committed to protecting the privacy and confidential health information of all of our patients, and we take this incident very seriously," said Sarah Morrow, chief privacy officer at the UNM Health Sciences Center, in a statement. "We have thoroughly investigated and identified the technical issues that [led] to the erroneous mailings, and we are monitoring the system to ensure this does not happen again."
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