Obamacare: Concerns over the Security of the Obamacare Data Hub

A provision in ObamaCare requiring medical providers to switch from paper patient charts to electronic records is intended to reduce costs and improve care. But privacy advocates fear the transition is too fast for security measures to keep pace. 

"The thing I worry about is not that we are doing it, but that we're doing it without the right safeguards," said Lee Tien, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "We have been giving (medical providers) incentives to move into the electronic-health-records era. But we haven't been giving them enough guidance on how they're supposed to do it." 

Tien is concerned more specifically with the timeline outpacing privacy laws that keep pharmaceutical companies and other entities outside hospitals and doctor's offices from exploiting the information for commercial use. 

"Like any other kind of customer data, it gets bought and sold and you have no idea where it went," Tien said. 

And cyber-security experts say consolidating vast amounts of patient information in large databases creates a big target for high-tech thieves, domestically and abroad. 

Daimon Geopfert -- a security and privacy expert with the McGladrey consulting group -- compares the situation to a group of banks with tunnels to the same vault. 

"The security of that master vault, in many cases, is as insecure as the least secure of those banks," he said. 

While advanced attacks do occur, Geopfert said, databases commonly encounter breaches caused by a single employee inadvertently exposing a computer to the same type of malicious software, or "malware," those everyday users routinely encounter through their daily Internet use. 

The malware can go unnoticed for months as it sends spam emails, infecting other computers on the system. And once the hackers realize they've infiltrated a hospital or doctor's office, patient records become an attractive target, according to Geopfert. 

"A lot of the breaches we run into start from something very trivial," he said.

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