Wednesday, February 6, 2008

PHI Spy, With My Little Eye...

Just how hard is it to build a secure health information exchange? Apparently pretty hard, because as reported by FCW foreign agencies are now working hard on exfiltrating civilian medical data from data warehouses.

The CDC has been hit, as well as a Military Health System server containing Tricare data. And, according to DHS, more and more attacks are coming against the health industry.

Hopefully, all these interoperable health data exchange systems will use open standards so we can all scrutinize them for security and get them fixed quickly when holes show up. Either way, it;s certainly something to think about as we make the slow crawl to electronic health records.

3 comments:

Matt said...

Sure, there's that. Plus a much scarier group wants your health care information -- health care marketers (such as myself).

Jaz said...

;o)

Nicely put.

Hence the need for all of us to be able to section off which parts of our record we want made available to whom. I'd be fine with you knowing I'm in the market for massage therapy, but not mental health product. Someone else might have a completely different outlook, but the point is we should have as much control over our medical history as we do our credit history. No more, no less.

Matt said...

Agreed. (I'd personally like slightly more.)

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