Tuesday, September 8, 2020
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A Notice to Our Patients
Roper St. Francis Healthcare values the privacy and confidentiality of our patients’ information. We have no indication that any of our patients’ information has been misused, but in an abundance of caution, we want to advise you of a recent incident that occurred at one of our vendors, Blackbaud, Inc., that may have involved some of your information.
Roper St. Francis Healthcare is one of thousands of healthcare systems, hospitals and other nonprofit organizations to be affected by a security incident at Blackbaud, the company that hosts our fundraising database. On July 31, Blackbaud informed us that an unauthorized party had gained access to Blackbaud’s systems between Feb. 7 and May 20 of this year. Blackbaud advised us that the unauthorized party may have acquired a backup copy of the database that manages our fundraising information. We immediately took steps to understand the extent of the incident and the data involved.
This incident did not affect all Roper St. Francis Healthcare patient information; rather it was limited to our fundraising database and did not involve any access to medical systems or electronic health records.
Based on information provided by Blackbaud, we have reason to believe that some information in our fundraising database was accessed or acquired by the unauthorized party and may have included patients’ names, ages, genders, dates of birth, addresses, dates of treatment, departments of service and treating physicians.
Importantly, Blackbaud has informed us that Social Security numbers, financial account and credit card information were encrypted, and therefore not able to be accessed by the unauthorized party.
We want our patients to know we are taking this matter very seriously. We began mailing letters regarding the incident to those whose information was contained in the Blackbaud database on September 8, and have also established a dedicated call center to answer any questions about this incident. Patients with questions can call 1-866-938-0447, Monday through Friday, between 9 a.m. and 6:30 p.m. EST.
We recommend patients review the statements they receive. Patients should contact their providers if they see services they did not receive.
We regret any concern or inconvenience this incident may cause our patients. To help prevent something like this from happening again, we are reviewing how information is stored with third-party vendors and are re-evaluating our relationship with Blackbaud.