According to many industry experts, medical identity theft is on the rise because it is profitable, and the increasing use of electronic health records makes more data accessible. Additionally, Credit card numbers and other forms of financial data are losing their market value. "While credit card data will earn a few dollars on the black market, medical and medical insurance account information can sell for hundreds," says Robbie Higgins, VP of security services at IT solution provider GlassHouse Technologies.

Also, explains, Higgins, while credit cards, banks, and financial services firms have systems highly tuned to spot fraudulent transactions, the same isn't true for health care services. "They're much less mature when it comes to their ability to spot fraudulent transactions," he says.

Jennifer Leuer, general manager of Experian's identification protection service ProtectMyID agrees. "The health care industry is much more fragmented, with dozens of providers potentially being part of a transaction," she says.

That's what makes incidents, like when managed health care services provider Health Net disclosed that 1.9 million customers were notified that server storage containing personal and health data went missing. The drives contained names, addresses, Social Security numbers, financial information and health data of current and former Health Net members, employees and health care providers, according to .