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The Department of Veterans Affairs has an unpleasant diagnosis for U.S. doctors -- nearly all of them were affected by the disappearance of a hard drive last month.
The hard drive, initially thought to contain the records of just 48,000 veterans, actually had data on 1.3 million living and deceased doctors -- a number exceeding the 902,053 doctors the American Medical Association said are practicing today, Government Executive magazine reported on its Web site Monday.
About 535,000 VA patients were also affected. The information on the hard drive pertained to treatment billed to Medicaid and Medicare, and could be used to create fraudulent Medicaid and Medicare invoices.
The department said a research assistant was using the data to compare VA health-care providers to non-VA providers; the data on the hard drive was a backup of data from an office computer and may not have been encrypted, it said.
The department is offering free credit monitoring for a year to affected people, and has placed the research assistant on administrative leave pending the outcome of a criminal investigation by the department's inspector general and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The FBI has found that though fewer employees are losing their laptop computers, it remains a problem. In an internal review, the bureau found that about three to four laptops go missing in an average month. In many cases, the department that lost them cannot determine whether they contained sensitive information, according to the Department of Justice.
Still, this is an improvement from five years ago, when a report said 354 weapons and 317 laptops disappeared in a 28-month period, the Associated Press reported...