Health IT investments continue as security experts express concern

As the federal government prepares to invest up to $34 billion in health information technology and develop a plan to oversee it that includes special measures to protect privacy, a rash of news stories about e-health security breaches has raised questions, Modern Healthcare reports. "Security experts say the spate of bad news does not reflect a fundamental change in the status quo, but rather the real state of security—or lack thereof—in the healthcare industry." More than half of large hospitals, a third of medium hospitals and a quarter of small facilities have suffered data breaches this year, according to a survey by a Health IT trade group (Conn, 12/9).

Meanwhile, as part of a plan to spend more than $500 million to upgrade and expand community health clinics, President Barack Obama Wednesday "announced the government also will dole out more than $88 million in grants through the program to help jump-start a transition from paper to electronic medical records," the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports (Keefe, 12/9).

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This article was reprinted from khn.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.