Medical ID Monitoring

A stolen medical identity could have serious consequences such as:

• Physical health threat. If someone uses your medical ID, they could contaminate your medical records, leading to you receiving the wrong treatment, diagnosis, being prescribed the wrong pharmaceutical, delays in receiving crucial care, or other errors that could worsen existing conditions or even cause death.
• Damaged reputation. 45% percent of Americans say medical identity theft harmed their reputation mainly because of the embarrassment linked to the disclosure of certain medical conditions.
• Missing an employment opportunity. If someone applies for a job yet has certain diseases or conditions erroneously listed in their health records, they might fail the screening process. Also, 19% of patients believe that their stolen medical identity blocked their access to some career opportunities, while 3% lost their jobs because of it.
• Financial losses/medical debt. Unlike financial institutions that refund victims of fraud, 36% of medical identity theft victims pay money out of their pocket to fix the issues. As a result, targeted patients could collectively pay as much as $12 billion to solve their cases in a year.
• Ruined credit. If crooks used your insurance to amass bills under your name, expect to be stuck with higher interest rates, have debt collectors on your back, receive notifications for unpaid bills, and be denied new credit cards, mortgages, loans, or jobs.
• Damaged insurance. Patients could lose all their medical insurance benefits, health, and life insurance coverage.
• Invasion of privacy. Similar to other types of identity theft, once your medical history is no longer confidential and virtually anybody can access information that you would like to keep private or buy it from hackers, your right to privacy has been breached.

More than 50% of Americans have had their identity stolen at some point or know someone who has been a victim of identity theft, with statistics on medical identity fraud showing the following:

• Data breaches in the healthcare industry rose 40% from 2016 to 2017.
• In 2015, healthcare services have dealt with more than 73 million security events, ranking first in cybersecurity attacks.
• 42% of 2015’s security incidents resulted from unauthorized access to the healthcare industry.
• 25% of Americans have had their medical data stolen, and 33% of those hacks took place in a hospital.
• According to a study featured in The American Journal of Managed Care (AJMC), in 2016, 16 million patient records were stolen in the US.
• In 2017, 27% of data breaches were connected to medical records.

Identity theft occurs when a fraudster uses another person’s personally identifiable information (PII), such as their name, date of birth, driver’s license number, social security number, credit card number, bank account, or passwords, without their authorization, to commit crimes. On the other hand, medical identity theft is a form of identity fraud that occurs when perpetrators use a patient’s name, social security number, health insurance number, and other PII data to purchase medical products, prescription drugs, or receive medical services or procedures on your health plan. The culprits, in this case, are usually “insiders” who work at healthcare facilities and can easily access patient information. They use the info themselves or sell it to organized medical identity theft gangs.

If you suspect you’ve been a victim of medical identity theft, you can immediately take a number of steps:

• Report the crime to the Federal Trade Commission at 877-438-4338 or online at IdentityTheft.gov. They will release an identity theft report with a recovery plan.
• To file Medicare-related complaints, contact the US Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Inspector General at 800-447-8477 or online.
• Even if only 40% of medical identity theft victims report it to law enforcement, it’s better to file a police report for your peace of mind.
• Contact your insurance provider and start gathering evidence. Get an “accounting of disclosures” (you’re entitled to request one per year) that shows who received your medical files from your healthcare provider.
• Request copies of your medical plan and medical files and ask medical providers to fix inaccuracies if needed.
• Consider adding a fraud alert to your credit reports and freezing your credit.
• Subscribe to medical ID monitoring services for your identity and credit reports so you can be notified when someone steals your identity and attempts to misuse your data.

Each health insurance plan is strictly associated with a person and their social security number, and it’s illegal to use another person’s insurance plan. However, if you lose your insurance card or if hackers or identity thieves intercept your personal data, they could take advantage of your medical plan to get treatment drugs and file health claims with your insurer, in your name, without your knowledge. In this case, the perpetrator’s medical data will compromise your medical records, treatments, insurance, and payment records.

Medical information is at least ten times more valuable than any other identifying data because:

• It contains more sensitive information than financial records, giving criminals more possibilities to commit fraud.
• Many patients don’t pay attention to their medical records; therefore, it takes longer to identify fraud.
• Crooks make 10 to 50 times more profit by selling or using medical identities rather than financial identities.

Medical identity thieves usually fall under five categories:

• Hackers. They practice social engineering scams to fraudulently get social security numbers and health insurance information from unsuspecting paying patients and medical providers.
• Healthcare employees. Nurses, doctors, and lab technicians at medical facilities know how the system works and often want to make a quick profit.
• Family. Twenty-four percent of consumers claim that a family member used their medical credentials without their permission.
• Organized crime rings. Perpetrators form entire networks. They buy stolen patient information from the black markets, then set up a system of fake clinics and start making fraudulent claims against honest patients’ insurance plans.

Besides offering identity and credit monitoring, IDStrong helps patients keep their medical identity under surveillance against data thieves. By monitoring a person’s medical insurance number and the medical records number assigned to individuals by hospitals and medical groups, we may be able to help people act against suspicious activities or changes linked to their personal details. Our search engine scours the internet, including the dark web, underground discussion forums, and black markets. When our search tools identify compromised data, we send you an alert notifying you of the data leak. Therefore, we’re enabling potential victims to take action sooner rather than later, which could minimize possible losses and could even help them prevent medical ID theft from happening.

Finding someone’s data exposed online doesn’t necessarily mean it’s already been used or bought by criminals; therefore, intercepting it on time could make a significant difference in preventing stolen medical identities from being an accessory to a crime.

Health insurance fraud can take place at any point during the medical insurance process, starting with purchasing coverage and ending with receiving care. Therefore, apart from medical identity theft, we have the following types of fraud:

• Medicare fraud (covered by the government instead of private health insurance companies) – scammers slip fake claims past Medicare overseers.
• Community mental health fraud – therapists bill patients and insurance companies for fictive, incomplete, or pointless services.
• Supply coverage and medical equipment/devices fraud – insurance businesses forge medical equipment claims, particularly for senior citizens. They issue false claims, overcharge them, or intentionally deliver (and bill) more than is needed.
• Ambulance fraud - ambulance service providers overcharge patients, sometimes even for services that weren’t offered.
• “Too-good-to-be-true” offers, discounts, and marketing scams - discount cards and plans that are sold by deceitful insurance agents as low-cost insurance policies but actually won’t cover medical claims.

Having a proactive approach to preventing identity theft makes a huge difference. Patients could stay safe from becoming victims of medical identity theft by adopting some simple cautionary steps such as:

• Frequently check medical records and have any errors corrected immediately.
• Monitor when and where you’re asked to share health information online, in person, or over the phone.
• Always read the privacy policies when buying medical coverage to know for sure where and when your information is shared.
• When filling out medical forms online, always use secure “HTTPS” websites and stay away from “HTTP” URLs.
• Keep both digital and paper copies of medical files and insurance records safe.
• Remove labels from prescription bottles and shred printed documents (healthcare statements, medical bills) that contain confidential data before throwing them away.
• Engage specialized monitoring services that cover your medical identity, such as medical records number and medical insurance number.
• Search for health organizations that abide by the “Red Flags Rule,” which makes it compulsory for businesses and healthcare providers to have a written identity theft prevention program targeted at discovering the “red flags” of id theft as part of their daily processes and taking steps to mitigate risk and minimize damages as early as possible.