Health Care Hacking On The Rise, Mass. General Study Finds

Health care hacking is on the rise, according to a new Massachusetts General Hospital study.

The researchers looked at all the reported breaches of health care information from 2010 to last year. While the number of breaches rose just slightly almost every year, the shift to big repositories of electronic health records has meant a network server attack could get at many more records at once.

"That's what I find striking about this result," says lead author Dr. Thomas McCoy, director of research at the Center for Quantitative Health at Mass. General. "We have this new class of breach in health care, which is the breach that affects millions of people."

Overall, the study finds, more than 176 million medical records were breached, the majority through health plans, but many through health care providers as well.