HIPAA Blog

[ Monday, June 02, 2008 ]

 

Medical ID Theft: Interesting article in this morning's Dallas Morning News on medical identity theft. I'm constantly harping that the biggest damage from medical record privacy is not the loss of actual medical information, but the risk that other information (especially social security numbers or other account or financial information) will be used for ID theft. One healthcare-specific ID theft issue is medical identity theft: when someone pretends to be you so they can ride your insurance policy. They happily pay the copay or deductible and let your insurance carrier pay the bulk of their hospitalization bill. It could give you a short-term benefit, in that they might end up paying off part of your out-of-pocket limit; but they also eat away at your lifetime benefit limit, and they could end up putting bad information in your medical record. If they're pretending to be you and filling up your hospital medical record with bad information (such as showing no allergies, when you actually have allergies to certain drugs), it could kill you. The article has some good tips on what to do to catch these free-riders. It is in your best interest, trust me.

Jeff [12:44 PM]

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