Institute:Office of National Coordinator (ONC) Workforce Training Curriculum
Component:The Culture of Health Care
Unit:Privacy, Confidentiality, and Security
Lecture:Tools for protecting privacy and confidentiality
Slide content:Medical Identity Theft AHIMA reported in 2008 a growing concern of general identity theft 2015 Medical Identity Fraud Alliance Annual Report Medical info more valuable than financial Costly to the victim Can be complex to solve over a long time HHS report outlines approaches to prevention, detection, and remediation (ONC & OCR, 2015) 8
Slide notes:A final security concern is medical identity theft, which significantly increased as the use of information technology expanded in health care. Medical identity information is more valuable than financial information, and the theft can go undetected for some time. When this happens, the victims are not only the individuals whose medical records have been compromised but also health care providers, health plans, and society at large who pay for health care. In 2008, the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA [uh- hee - muh ]) determined that general identity theft is a growing concern and that the value of medical identity information is much higher than that of other information, such as Social Security numbers. Today, medical identity theft is one of the top crimes facing the country, and projections indicate that this problem will only continue. The 2015 Medical Identity Fraud Alliance annual report, supported by Ponemon Institute, showed that medical identity theft incidents increased twenty-one-point-seven percent from 2014. The study estimated that two-point-three-two million adult-aged Americans or close family members became victims of medical identity theft during or before 2014. Medical identity theft is costly. Sixty-five percent of medical identity theft victims in the 2015 study had to pay an average of thirteen thousand five hundred dollars to resolve the crime. In some cases, they paid the health care provider, repaid the insurer for services obtained by the thief, or engaged an identity service provider or legal counsel to help resolve the incident and prevent future fraud. ( Ponemon 2015) It can be months before a victim uncovers an incident, and few achieve resolution of the incident, which places them at risk for future theft. Medical identity is used to obtain health care services, prescription pharmaceuticals, or medical equipment and to fraudulently receive government benefits such as Medicare or Medicaid. Some thieves access a victims medical records and/or modify the record. HHS, along with other organizations, addresses this problem and publishes resources that outline various approaches to prevention, detection, and remediation of medical identity theft. 8