What is Medical Identity Theft and How Do Hospitals Prevent Them?

What is medical identity theft?

To put it simply, medical identity theft occurs when a third party steals a patient’s information and gets access to the services which were originally meant for the patients. These include healthcare services, obtaining drugs, treatment, and so on.

“What is medical identity theft?” has a different answer as well. The victims’ information can be used by the fraudster to submit unauthorized claims to insurance providers against services never used by the patients.

This shows how serious medical identity theft is, right? It is quite a significant problem for healthcare providers, patients, and insurance companies, as medical identity theft is common in the US. For instance, 2019 saw more healthcare records breached compared to the previous three years combined. However, moving from what is medical identity theft, let’s focus on the tools used to commit medical identity theft.

How fraudsters commit medical identity theft

It is quite simple, actually. A bad actor usually needs some personal information in order to assume the identity of the victim and commit medical identity theft. The information may contain but is not limited to, name, DOB, Social Security number, along with other healthcare-related information of the patient. Usually, fraudsters can either obtain the information from the patient directly by stealing it or else they can buy it from the black market. Armed with the stolen information, fraudsters assume the identity of the victim and show up in the ED of the hospital - gaining access to healthcare services, drugs, and much more.

Fortunately, leading healthcare providers do not need to worry about it - they prevent medical identity theft in real-time with RightPatient. The platform red flags fraudsters when they try to assume the identity of others, saving the patients and providers a lot of money and time. RightPatient shows how improving the accuracy of patient identification can boost profitability in the process.

However, along with financial problems, there are other issues associated with medical identity theft.

Problems associated with medical identity theft

Most people focus on what is medical identity theft more than the problems it causes because most think that the problems are limited to financial costs. However, the reality is different.

One of the more obvious consequences of medical identity theft is financial costs. For instance, healthcare providers can end up paying settlement costs of up to $250,000 resulting from medical identity theft. Patients, on the other hand, may have to pay $13,500 on average to resolve the issues.

That’s not the only headache though. The more dangerous problem of medical identity theft is that it adds the health information of the fraudster to the EHR (electronic health record) of the patient. This ultimately leads to patient harm, as the record is not accurate anymore. For instance, medical history, medications, allergies, etc. will be incorporating the information provided by the fraudster. Patient safety is in jeopardy, which will haunt the provider in the future.

In fact, around 80% of patients expect their providers to protect their medical records, while 50% would change providers if their medical records are compromised. Thus, medical identity theft leads to loss of goodwill of hospitals that cannot prevent such cases. Some patients may even hit their hospitals with lawsuits if they prevent their medical records from being compromised. Fortunately, providers using RightPatient do not face such issues since it prevents medical identity theft effectively.

RightPatient prevents medical identity theft

As mentioned a few times, RightPatient is a touchless biometric patient identification platform that helps prevent medical identity theft. It saves significant costs for the patients, prevents patient harm while saving millions for providers. It has been successfully protecting over 10 million patient records over the years. But how does it do that?

It locks the medical records of the patients by capturing a photo and attaching it with the record upon registration. Whenever the patient returns to the hospital, all he/she needs to do is look at the camera - the platform matches the captured data with the saved one, providing the accurate medical record within seconds. Thus, if a fraudster comes pretending to be a patient to a hospital using RightPatient, he/she will be caught redhanded as the photos will not match, preventing medical identity theft in real-time.

RightPatient also protects medical records even if there is a data breach. The stolen records will be useless for the buyer, as it will not allow him/her to access the healthcare services of the patients. In this case, too, they will simply be red-flagged during identity verification.

Given the COVID-19 pandemic, a touchless biometric patient identification platform seems to make even more sense. It is hygienic, it prevents medical identity theft, reduces denied claims, prevents duplicate records - adding millions to the bottom line of its users. It is high-time more providers switch to RightPatient to ensure patient safety and reduce costs as hospitals reopen post-COVID-19.