Seton Healthcare Network is trying to recover the personal information of roughly 7,800 of its patients, after someone stole one of its laptops last week, a spokesperson for Seton said.

Seton says a thief stole the laptop from a leased office building in North Austin. The office is secured and visitors need a badge to enter.

"Thieves can break in anywhere," said Greg Hartman, Senior VP of Planning and Marketing of Seton.

Hartman says someone got into a secured building where Seton stores much of its information, then walked out with a Dell laptop and a video projector. It's what's stored on the laptop that's causing concern.

"There may be social security numbers related to it, some of it may be medical records like CHIP numbers or Medicaid numbers, there was no actual personal health information on here," said Hartman.

Hartman says the personal information of nearly 7,800 uninsured patients who visited a Seton ER or clinic since July 2005 could be at risk.

"When that happens, we go ahead and treat them right away, but we also gather information so we can help qualify them for some sort of medical plan - maybe it's Medicaid or something like that - the CHIP program if that makes sense," said Hartman.

Hartman says the laptop is password-protected.

"Were in the process now encrypting our laptop computers that are used for this purpose so that if someone does steal it, theres no way they could ever get to this information.  It's an expensive process but we had begun doing that.  Unfortunately this laptop hadn't had the encryption software put on it yet," said Hartman.

"Good hackers, the bad guys, can get around almost any encryption," said Darren Spohn, president and CEO of Spohn & Associates, a security consulting company in Austin.

Spohn says passwords do very little to deter a determined thief.

"A lot of people who steal these aren't looking for the hardware costs, they're looking for the data that's inside, which is much more valuable," said Spohn.

Spohn says even the slightest bit of information can result in big problems.

"If you look at what you can do with identity theft -- you can open up a credit card with two things -- date of birth and your social security number," said Spohn.

Seton says it does have surveillance video of the thief. That video was handed over to Austin police. APD has not released it.

Seton is working to notify all affected patients -- and will be mailing out letters later this week.