“In other news, today the federal Office of Health Information Technology confirmed that the health records for 178 million Americans had been copied by hackers breaking into a computer in the main office in Washington. They emphasized that they did not expect that anyone’s health care privacy had been compromised by the break-in and said that they were taking steps to improve the security of the system to prevent future break-ins. The flawed security was traced to the former Bush administration that badly botched the computerization of health care records.”
That’s true. It’s not just a database that has to be created. How is the database accessed? How are responses on whether a procedure can be done routed back to physicians? How is information added? Are new records transmitted to it over the internet? There will be multiple ways of intercepting information, not just the risk of the database itself.