According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, in 2016 there have been 49 health security breaches in which at least 500 individuals were affected. Overall, more than 2 million Americans have had sensitive personal data exposed to cyber thieves.

The most recent significant infiltration took place at the Central Ohio Urology Clinic, which had 150 gigabytes of its data stolen and leaked to the public. It included all types of sensitive information, including patient sperm count and the types of treatments they were receiving.

There is nevertheless compelling evidence that things have gotten better, perhaps as a result of increased vigilance from organizations entrusted with sensitive records.

In March, for instance, PBS estimated that only 3.5 million health records had been compromised during the first three months of 2016, well behind the rate of hackings from 2015, when 113 million records were compromised.

One security measure that appears promising was recently developed by Dr. William Yasnoff, a managing partner of the National Health Information Infrastructure Advisors. Yasnoff created a system that keeps each individual health record separate, so that hackers would have to break into each record, rather than being able to access thousands just by breaking into one file.

Yasnoff recently told Healthcare IT News that under his system, the work necessary to access the hundreds of thousands of records that hackers seek would be "prohibitively massive."

One can only hope.