Although there has been intense focus in the healthcare industry on securing electronic forms of protected health information and medical records, paper records are still highly vulnerable.
“While not as easily transferrable as its digital counterpart, the information in paper-based medical records remains extremely lucrative in the black market,” warned New York City-based attorney Jordan Cohen in analysis for the law firm Mintz Levin. Experts estimate that an individual’s medical data can fetch as much as 10 times the value of a credit card number.
You can expect “increasing scrutiny given this lucrative black market as well as the recent high-profile breaches at various health insurance companies across the United States,” Cohen predicted.