If FBI can't make US computer networks secure obviously it's not time to computerize our medical records

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4/3/2012, "Your Medical Records Vulnerable to Hackers," Wall St. Journal, letters

"If the Federal Bureau of Investigation with all of its resources can't make our computer networks secure ("U.S. Outgunned in Hacker War," Marketplace, March 28), what chance do hospitals or individual doctors' offices have at making their networks secure?

The push to electronic medical records comes with high costs, including a less secure medical record. Patient advocates and the government should reconsider their push for EMR until medical records can be truly secure, as required by law.

Edward Stroh, M.D.

Rockville Centre, N.Y."

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""Once files are in electronic form, the crime scales up quickly"...It can be life threatening if they (patients) receive the wrong treatment"...

3/23/2010, "Patient Is Billed for Liposuction She Never Had as Medical ID Theft Rises," Bloomberg, Margaret Collins

"There were more than 275,000 cases in the U.S. last year of medical information theft, twice the number in 2008, according to Javelin Strategy & Research, a Pleasanton, California-based market research firm. The average fraud cost $12,100, Javelin said.

"A trend we've seen over the past few years is using stolen information to file false claims," said Louis Saccoccio, executive director of the Washington-based National Health Care Anti-Fraud Association, a non-profit research group.

Criminals set up fake clinics to bill for phony treatments, said Pam Dixon, founder of the World Privacy Forum, a non-profit consumer-research group based in San Diego, California, which has worked with more than 3,000 victims. Thieves also may impersonate a patient, like in Morgan's case, and some medical workers download records to sell, she said....

"Once files are in electronic form, the crime scales up quickly," said Dixon, whose group analyzed a decade of consumer data from the Federal Trade Commission

• and medical identity theft cases from the Department of Justice.

"There are cases where someone has walked out with thousands and thousands of files on a thumb drive," she said. You can't do that with paper files."

Patients' medical records are altered to reflect diseases or treatments they never had, which can be life threatening if they receive the wrong treatment or find their health insurance exhausted, Dixon said. A thief may change the billing address for a victim's insurance so they're unaware of charges, she said.

"Once you aggregate and put data in one place it's easier for you to see it but it's also easier for a criminal to see and use it," said Scott Mitic, chief executive officer of Redwood City, California-based TrustedID, a consumer data-protection firm. "The digitization of medical records over the next years is certainly going to make this more of an issue.""...

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Ed. note: On March 24, 2010, Margaret Collins of Bloomberg, the author of the above article, was interviewed by John Batchelor on his radio show regarding her report on computerized medical record theft. In response to his question, she replied that her sources told her massive financial losses were being perpetrated by organized crime at a sophisticated level. I didn't see organized crime per se mentioned in the Bloomberg article. I made notes of the interview at that time and mention it now as a point of interest.

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