Road Blocks to Converting to Electronic Medical Records

What is medical identity theft? Why would someone want to steal my medical identity? Stealing one's medical identity is simply taking one's medical history including prescriptions so as to use the history to get surgeries or drugs they would otherwise be unable to get if not insured. So why then would electronic medical records have any effect on the number of medical identity thefts? Experts think it will become even easier for those people to get individuals records online or hack into data bases of medical facilites to get the records they want. Currently of all identity theft, medical identity only accounts for about 3% of all identity theft, but experts think that number will rise dramatically with the creation of electronic medical records.
We can obviously see the great importance of having a very strong firewall and taking every precaution necessary to ensure the privacy of these medical records. Perhaps a more startling and bigger problem however is that there seems to be a growing trend in the number of "inside" jobs of medical identity theft. Workers in health care facilities helping friends/ families file false insurance claims using the records of other people. One particular case showed a worker help a cousin receive close to $3 million dollars in false claims. So as we move toward a future of electronic medical records one of the great obstacles we need to overcome is to ensure privacy and safety of these records so that it truly does not the American person money instead of causing heartache, headache, and finincial perrils.