One of my deep personal concerns is the security of off-site medical records. An industrious hacker could wreck havoc on records (changing meds, allergies, history, etc.) as well as break confidentiality. The recent Sony break-in, according to Bloomberg news, was done by a hacker who bought public and inexpensive computer processing time from Amazon’s Elastic Cloud — in effect, Amazon offers very enhanced computing machines that, with designed software, can find and break through codes and firewalls. My first days of computer programing watched an angry grad student cleverly take control of a huge computer. (He seemed to disappear the day after — rumor had it that IBM hired him.)
The Bloomberg piece raises many key issues about where we are going with medical records; we need to be more patient about the reality of electronic medical records stored off-site until technology removes more of these vulnerabilities. Too many computer systems suffered break-in’s over the last few months.
I feel about this as I do about nuclear reactors — the idea is great, but the engineering is yet to be up to what we need.
The article:
