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A small organization that operates a massive database of Idaho patient medical records filed for bankruptcy on Friday, reporting it owes creditors $4 million and is defending itself in three lawsuits, Boise State Public Radio reported. Chapter 11 bankruptcy will allow the Idaho Health Data Exchange to keep operating while it pays creditors and works through litigation, according to its bankruptcy attorney, Matthew T. Christensen of the Johnson May law firm in Boise. The health data exchange is a nonprofit organization that provides a centralized repository of health records. It allows participating health care providers to see each other’s records for individual patients — so that, for example, a primary care doctor in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, could access X-ray records for their patient who was treated for a broken bone in Nampa. The IHDE currently lists 194 health care providers and organizations among its participants, including the state’s largest health systems. The Idaho Health Data Exchange launched in 2009 and relied mainly on government funds intended to modernize health records infrastructure. For example, it received $5.9 million of federal funding in 2010 as the designated health information exchange for Idaho. More recently, the health data exchange received millions of dollars of federal funds per year through the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare. That income stream ended when the HITECH Act, a 2009 law, expired last year, according to the health data exchange’s executive director and its bankruptcy attorney.

As the pandemic shuttered businesses and forced people out of work, the federal government sent a flood of relief money into programs aimed at helping the newly unemployed and boosting the economy. That included $3.1 trillion that former President Donald J. Trump approved in 2020, followed by a $1.9 trillion package signed into law in 2021 by President Biden. But those dollars came with few strings and minimal oversight, the New York Times reported. The result: one of the largest frauds in American history, with billions of dollars stolen by thousands of people, including at least one amateur who boasted of his criminal activity on YouTube. Now, prosecutors are trying to catch up. There are currently 500 people working on pandemic-fraud cases across the offices of 21 inspectors general, plus investigators from the F.B.I., the Secret Service, the Postal Inspection Service and the Internal Revenue Service. The federal government has already charged 1,500 people with defrauding pandemic-aid programs, and more than 450 people have been convicted so far. But those figures are dwarfed by the mountain of tips and leads that investigators still have to chase. Agents in the Labor Department’s inspector general’s office have 39,000 investigations going. About 50 agents in a Small Business Administration office are sorting through two million potentially fraudulent loan applications.