HHS Faces 500 Million Cyber Attacks Each Week

Beth Killoran, the chief information officer (CIO) for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), recently told a tech conference that her department faces "500 million cyber hack attempts each week" due to the millions of medical records that HHS data centers control. "That's going to go up," she said at the MarkLogic Data Integration Summit June 20. "Because health data is the one thing about you that you can't change, and it's very powerful information, and the value of that data is going to go up." Killoran said HHS maintains "one in three Americans' PHI [personally identifiable information]." The CIO admitted that her agency's biggest challenge is putting all the data to "meaningful use." She said the goal is to expand avenues of communication between health care professionals and patients and also expanding "telehealth practices."