Are e-Health records safe from prying eyes?

As if it were not hard enough to wrestle e-Health data to the ground, a new report by a university technology professor blows the whistle on just how easy it is to grab thousands of medical files with names, addresses and Social Security numbers for patients under care.

The research by M. Eric Johnson, director of the Center for Digital Strategies at Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH, is certain to put a damper on the huge push by the Obama administration to make electronic health records the norm, not the exception, in the health care arena.

Johnson said he used peer-to-peer applications to access medical records on computers that had peer-to-peer programs stored on their hard drives. That may be one reason that federal agencies are prohibiting federal workers from doing anything with their computers not directly linked to their work. But it may not be enough to keep the records safe. In his research, Johnson was able to grab the records of 20,000 patients at one hospital that identified those with, among other illnesses, AIDS and cancer.

The disclosure is particularly alarming since the Obama administration has designated $19 billion for agencies to help fund a nationwide health information network. The government hopes to provide every American with an electronic health record by 2014, in hopes of keeping health care costs down.

For more on this story:
- check out this nextgov.com article