Study: Breaches plague electronic health data
Electronic health records were supposed to make life better for patients and doctors — getting rid of bulky and messy paper files, streamlining delivery of care and organizing medical information so that scientists could use it to make discoveries.
But those benefits could be for naught if digital medical data aren’t safe — and they don’t appear to be.
A new analysis of government records, published in the journal JAMA, found that close to 1,000 large data breaches affected 29 million medical records between 2010 and 2013.
Nearly 60 percent were the result of theft, according to study co-authors Dr. Vincent Liu, of the Kaiser Permanente Division of Research in Oakland, Calif., and Dr. Mark Musen and Timothy Chou, of Stanford University.
The team mined an online database of health data breaches maintained by the Department of Health and Human Services.
They focused on data breaches affecting 500 or more people — 949 cases in all, which made up 82.1 percent of the reports in the database in the years studied.
Six breaches affected at least 1 million records apiece. And more than a third of the breaches occurred in five states — California, Florida, Illinois, New York and Texas.
“The personal information of patients in the United States is not safe, and it needs to be,” wrote Dr. David Blumenthal of the Commonwealth Fund and attorney Deven McGraw of the law firm Manatt Phelps & Phillips in an editorial that accompanied the JAMA study.
Blumenthal and McGraw wrote that concerns about data security could lead patients to resist sharing data online, affecting medical quality and crippling research.