In an announcement Thursday, Providence Home Services, a division of Seattle-based Providence Health Systems, said the records and other data were on several disks and tapes stolen from the car of a Providence employee at his home. The incident was reported by the employee on Dec. 31, according to the health care system.

The tapes and disks were taken home by the employee as part of a backup protocol that sent them off-site to protect them against loss from fires or other disasters. That practice, which was only used by the home health care division of the hospital system, has since been stopped, said health system spokesman Gary Walker.

"This was only done in one area of the company," Walker said. "It did not involve the hospital's database [of patients]....That one part of the company was sending data home off-site. But we should have reviewed the policy."

Walker said Thursday that the data on the tapes was encrypted, but today he corrected that information. Instead, some of the data on the tapes was password-protected at the application level, he said, while the rest of the data was stored in proprietary file formats without password-protection. "Our IT person and I ... miscommunicated about what is being done and what was being done."

The data on the disks, meanwhile, was in a proprietary file format that was not encrypted, but "is stored in a way that would make it difficult, if not impossible, for someone to access it, then make any sense out of it," he said.