Security and Risk Complaints Online Medical Identity Theft: Problems and Prevention Edit Title



The impact of medical identity theft





Coincidence or crime?

Patient misidentification may not necessarily involve criminal activity. Often medical identity issues arise due to the inadequacy of name and birthday as current identifiers. Even if the identity of a patient is verified, there is a significant chance that other patients in that system share the same name or birthday, and sometimes both.

Although released several years ago, the Harris Health System in Houston published a set of data that demonstrates just how many similar identifying factors some patients share. Among more than 3.4 million patients, two patients sharing the same first and last name occurred 249,213 times. In the same set of data, patients sharing the same first name, last name and birthday occurred almost 70,000 times. Five or more patients shared the same first and last name more than 76,000 times. Are these records unique individuals or duplicates? How many represent different people? Or is medical identity theft a factor?

Securing patient identity

There are numerous coinciding factors that providers use to identify patients. The verifiability and accuracy of these records is imperative for health organizations to keep track of individual patients and manage the overall patient population. To prevent medical identity theft and keep treatment and diagnosis as accurate as possible, health systems need a reliable method of deciphering patients with an uncompromising identity-proofing process.

Health organizations must invest in the appropriate health IT to ensure patients are not vulnerable to the costly risks of medical identity theft—and that technology must involve identity-proofing individuals across multiple healthcare settings, not just in siloes. Implementing a unique health safety identifier (UHSI) is a great first step in strengthening IT security, preserving data integrity and saving health organizations and their patients’ money. And taking these legacy challenges out of the health IT ecosystem will allow an acceleration toward a value-based care delivery model.

The success of value-based care demands innovative, reliable health IT solutions. A unique health safety identifier is a positive start to improving data quality at the point of care, as well as along the entire spectrum of care and within the growing virtual care arena. The goal for every care provider must be: one patient, one identity, one record.

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