Quest Diagnostics says nearly 12 million people may have had personal, financial, and medical data leaked

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last updated 3 June 2019

Around 11.9 million Quest Diagnostics patients may have had serious personal information leaked due to an issue with a payment system the company contracts with.

Quest's billing collections vendor, American Medical Collection Agency, informed the company on May 14 about a system breach, Quest said in a Monday filing. AMCA didn't have access to patients' lab results, but social security, credit card, and bank account numbers could have been leaked, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Quest is one of the world's largest chains of blood testing facilities, and uses AMCA to bill about 11.9 million of its patients. Sometime between Aug. 1, 2018 and March 30, 2019, someone gained unauthorized access to the data stored in AMCA, NBC News Philadelphia reports. It's unclear just what or how much data was accessed because AMCA has not yet provided a "detailed or complete" report, Quest said Monday. But information stored on AMCA's affected system "included financial information (e.g., credit card numbers and bank account information), medical information, and other personal information (e.g., Social Security Numbers)," Quest continued.

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Kathryn is a graduate of Syracuse University, with degrees in magazine journalism and information technology, along with hours to earn another degree after working at SU's independent paper The Daily Orange. She's currently recovering from a horse addiction while living in New York City, and likes to share her extremely dry sense of humor on Twitter.

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