HIPAA Blog

[ Monday, July 14, 2014 ]

 

Big Health Data Breaches Are Inevitable, and Are Coming: This article has popped up several places in my morning reading.  They are probably right; in fact, some big health data hacks have probably already occurred, but we just don't know about them yet because we don't yet know how the data is being used and aren't able to see it.  There are probably millions of individual instances of medical identity theft occurring every day, from the voluntary "sharing" of insurance by cooperative parties (your brother has insurance through his job but you don't so you go to a doctor and pretend to be him so that his insurance will pay for your care) to identity theft facilitated by insiders (a nurse or receptionist issues multiple Oxycontin prescriptions to a legitimate pain patient, but sends the extras to a friend who fills them and resells the pills) to pure identity theft (a hacker gains medical identities and sells them to people who use the unwitting victim's insurance to pay for their care). 

Medical identity theft can be much more lucrative that stealing credit card info, since the medical information is more persistent and the credit card info is more transitory (you can get a new credit card number, not a new medical history).  That said, you need a purchaser who needs healthcare to complete a medical identity theft, whereas credit card info can always be used immediately.

Jeff [12:45 PM]

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