Patients accumulate vast quantities of healthcare data over the
course of their lives. Those data are generally housed in
centralized servers operated by various unrelated industry
participants, including government regulators and payors, insurance
carriers, hospitals, doctors, pharmacies and pharmaceutical
companies.
Unfortunately, those repositories rely on disparate data
practices. In addition, they are alluring targets for bad actors.
In October 2009, the U.S. Department of Health and Human
Services' Office for Civil Rights (DOH) began publishing
statistics for data breaches involving U.S. healthcare
information.1 What began as a low rumble in 2009 has
crested into a wave of leaked information nearly a decade later.
For example, in 2015, more than 100 million Americans had their
healthcare data taken without their permission.2 Though
2015 was an outlier in terms of the sheer volume of information
taken, the picture painted by the DOH's statistics indicates
that
