As those of you not living in a tunnel already know by now, a huge crop of celebrity nude photos leaked online over the weekend. Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton and Kirsten Dunst were just a few of the dozen or so starlets who found their private photos — or offensive fakes — splashed all across the web.
(Actually, from what I understand, there's a ring of these hackers who've been trading these stolen pics like baseball cards for months. The story just happened to bubble its way up to the mainstream this weekend.)
What the hell does this have to do with you? Well, as Apple preps for its annual launch event — more on that in a minute — we're hit with yet another "nothing is secure" story. Hey, if you think finding last weekend's selfie on Reddit is bad, what if it was a copy of your full medical history? What if everyone on the planet found out about your gout, your Crohn's disease, or that you were HIV-positive?
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What if these societal dregs had hacked HealthCare.gov instead of iCloud? Or cleared out your HSA after your last trip to the pharmacy?
One of the biggest barriers to improving efficiencies in both health care delivery and payments — while actually tackling costs — is to figure out a way to make the final leap to electronic health records. And security remains a huge part of that.
According to the Identity Theft Resource Center, and as reported by Fortune, health care jumped to the head of the pack of industry breaches for the first time, accounting for nearly 45 percent of all data breaches in 2013. In fact, according to an ID Experts' report from earlier this year, "Ninety percent of health care organizations…have had at least one data breach in the past two years. However, 38 percent report that they have had more than five incidents."
That same study revealed a 100 percent jump in health care breaches over just the last four years. And most organizations — nearly 70 percent of them — felt PPACA made things worse, especially given insecure state and federal exchange websites. ACO participation — all the rage these days — also exposes everyone in the network with the increased exchange of digital information.
And despite the black eye this scandal's dealt Apple — whether it's justified or not — don't expect the tech giant to back away from its entry into the mobile health market. A lot of people — myself included — fully expect Apple to do to mobile health what it did with mobile phones.
In fact, Product Design and Development reported a couple of weeks back that GlobalData analyst Linda Tian insists "Apple's strategy to unite medical applications, electronic health records and peripheral devices through a platform, reported to be the HealthKit, will be a major milestone in the wave of technology-health care alliances.
"This move into the mobile health space promises significant future returns for Apple, as GlobalData forecasts this market to grow at a Compound Annual Growth Rate of 31.5 percent, from an estimated $3 billion in 2013 to $11.8 billion by 2018."
Yeah, that's billions, with a B. No wonder hackers are flocking to the health care business like flies on…well, you know…
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