Monday, May 04, 2009

Cost of Electronic Health Records to Include Ransom?


The Obama administration expects huge savings from electronic health records. Did their analysis take into account hackers hijacking the database? It may cost Virginia $10 million. WaPo reported:

Hackers last week broke into a Virginia state Web site used by pharmacists to track prescription drug abuse. They deleted records on more than 8 million patients and replaced the site's homepage with a ransom note demanding $10 million for the return of the records.

Savings may not be as great as projected, unless they budgeted for ransoms. Instead of diverting drugs, hackers diverted a whole database.

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