Mysterious TRICARE Facility Identified

Last week SAIC said a computer tape containing sensitive health care data on 4.9 million TRICARE beneficiaries was stolen from the car of an employee who was transporting them from one San Antonio-area federal facility to another. But the company declined to identify either facility.

After poking around various TRICARE budget documents and slide sites, I've determined that one of those facilities was a TRICARE alternate computer center (the primary computer center is in Montgomery, Ala.) that houses records for all 9.6 million TRICARE beneficiaries.

The TRICARE data center in San Antonio is a humongous operation, according to a slide set that includes 222 Sun servers, 72 Intel servers and 10 Linux servers.

That's not all folks -- that data center also houses the backup for the Military Health System Data Repository, which consists of a staggering total of more than five billion records.

This brings us to another mystery: TRICARE in a statement said the stolen tape contained a wealth of data on patients treated in San Antonio clinics from 1992 through this Sept. 7.

Since the stolen tape contained records amounting to more than half of the total TRICARE beneficiary population, I've talked to more than one person who suspects that the records on that stolen tape amount to more than just folks treated in San Antonio.