Stop Thief!

A Harris Interactive poll suggests that public awareness of health privacy concerns is on the rise, according to a report in Modern Healthcare.  The poll is described as an “online interactive” survey, however, which raises concerns about sampling validity.  That caveat aside, it’s interesting to note that there appears to be increasing public awareness of health data theft and data security issues – which, as we have written here before, are rampant.  (We’ve been following health privacy concerns for some time now.)

The poll also suggests that data thefts could be undermining public support for Electronic Health Records (EHR), which is another reason to get this problem under control before it escalates any further.

The Modern Healthcare article also reports that Booz Allen Hamilton was awarded a $450,000 grant in order to

…do an “environmental scan” to get its arms around the problem, then convene a meeting to gather ideas on how medical identity theft should be addressed, and then to write up an action plan recommending ways to deal with the problem.

I would’ve liked to have that contract, and I could’ve done it for a lot less.  We haven’t begun to explore the full implications of rampant health data theft – and we shouldn’t, at least in a public forum.

Still, I suspect the real solution to this problem is going to come from an imaginative entrepreneur, not a Federally-funded study.

(via CHCF’s iHealthBeat; image courtesy Medical Informatics Insider)