A publicly accessible database powering a new federal Medicare portal exposed health care providers’ Social Security numbers for at least several weeks before a Washington Post reporter flagged the problem to officials, the Post reported on Thursday.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services built the directory to help seniors identify which doctors and medical providers accept which insurance plans, framing it as part of the Trump administration’s push to modernize health care technology. The database contained some providers’ Social Security numbers linked to their names and was publicly accessible the entire time.
CMS attributed the exposure to “incorrect entries of provider or provider-representative-supplied information in the wrong places” — framing it as a provider data entry error rather than a system design failure, and placing responsibility on the health workers whose sensitive information was exposed rather than on the agency that built and launched the portal. Officials said they are working to fix the problem.
The incident is the latest in a series of technical failures tied to the administration’s effort to build a national health provider directory. The number of affected providers has not been disclosed, and it remains unknown whether any unauthorized parties accessed the data during the weeks it sat publicly available.
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Some secondary outlets have attributed the portal to DOGE, the administration’s cost-cutting initiative, which has faced scrutiny over its access to sensitive federal databases held by the Department of Health and Human Services and CMS. The Post attributes the directory to CMS directly.
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