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- 30/8/21
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The medical industry is at constant risk of fraud just like any other sector, but healthcare is a sensitive matter in itself. Crimes like identity fraud have adverse consequences in healthcare.
Due to the coronavirus pandemic, it has become necessary for many institutions to continue their operations through digital platforms. As a result, where the global online system has facilitated customers, it has also brought new ways for fraudsters to manipulate the system. Medical identity theft is a growing issue faced by the healthcare sector.
Medical Identity Theft
Medical identity theft occurs when fraudsters steal the personal information of patients and use them for their own benefit. For instance, they often use the patient's health insurance, drug prescriptions, and free medical treatment.
Sometimes people are ignorant towards the safekeeping of their medical records and insurance cards. Fraudsters use this to their advantage and steal sensitive information such as identification codes for these medical records.
Hospital staff can access the patient records and they are often directly or directly involved in medical identity theft. While pretending to check medical records before treatment, they can purposely steal information or leak the patient's records while working.
There are several huge databases for storing information in the healthcare sector, and these are always hackable by cybercriminals. Fraudsters breach secure hospital databases and steal patient records for their benefit.
Criminals have the same intention but they target different organizations. The common intention is to steal/manipulate others' money. However, hospital records are extremely sensitive, and stealing these records affects the patient not just financially, but may even cause their death.
These crimes affect doctors, medical staff, and patients alike because the records do not remain consistent. When doctors cannot correctly determine the patient's problem, it results in significant problems between them and the patients.
Following are the common ways criminals use to target the healthcare sector:
Data
Data involve the cybercriminal gaining illegal access to patient records from the hospital database and then using the stolen information to fake their identity. Data are a common crime because there is a lack of proper security systems in medical institutions.
Ransomware
Ransomware or computer virus is another technique that fraudsters use to manipulate the system. Usually, this is done using fake advertisements that automatically install ransomware in the user's computer when clicked on.
Identity theft
The information that criminals get from data involved and ransomware is then used for medical identity theft. The fraudster pretends to be a patient and sometimes successful gets in getting free drug prescriptions and insurance.
Phishing
Phishing involves spam emails that fool the patient to enter sensitive information assuming it to be the requirement of the medical institution. These emails seem legitimate and so do the usernames that are used to send them.
Data Security in Healthcare
It's now obvious that identity verification is the need of the hour when it comes to preventing medical identity theft and providing healthcare privacy and security. Just like banks and fintech companies are required to incorporate KYC (know your customer) services, hospitals also need to verify their patients' identities, and also their medical staff.
This can help in providing the required and correct medical treatment to legitimate patients while filtering out fraudsters at the same time. In many countries, KYP ( know your patient ) guidelines are now enforced by law, and failure to comply with these rules results in penalties for the medical institution. A law has also been formatted for digital ID verification for pharmaceuticals in the United Kingdom.
Laws To Prevent Healthcare Fraud
Certain rules and regulations have been enforced for the healthcare sector in order to get rid of medical identity theft. The doctors, management, medical staff, and patients need to be provided a secure environment where their data and health remain intact.
Patients that become the victim of medical identity theft go to the extremes and take the medical institutions to court because of the sensitive nature of these crimes. This is why the following regulations were formatted to prevent medical identity theft.
HIPAA
The health insurance portability and accountability act is a part of the law that includes these key points:
NHS good practices
NHS good practices are used for online patient verification and for those patients that cannot verify themselves, their representatives are required to help them in online verification.
Final Thoughts
To summarize, medical identity theft is a rising crime that has serious consequences. Hospitals must ensure the implementation of online identity verification as part of KYP in order to rid themselves of this problem.
Due to the coronavirus pandemic, it has become necessary for many institutions to continue their operations through digital platforms. As a result, where the global online system has facilitated customers, it has also brought new ways for fraudsters to manipulate the system. Medical identity theft is a growing issue faced by the healthcare sector.
Medical Identity Theft
Medical identity theft occurs when fraudsters steal the personal information of patients and use them for their own benefit. For instance, they often use the patient's health insurance, drug prescriptions, and free medical treatment.
Sometimes people are ignorant towards the safekeeping of their medical records and insurance cards. Fraudsters use this to their advantage and steal sensitive information such as identification codes for these medical records.
Hospital staff can access the patient records and they are often directly or directly involved in medical identity theft. While pretending to check medical records before treatment, they can purposely steal information or leak the patient's records while working.
There are several huge databases for storing information in the healthcare sector, and these are always hackable by cybercriminals. Fraudsters breach secure hospital databases and steal patient records for their benefit.
Criminals have the same intention but they target different organizations. The common intention is to steal/manipulate others' money. However, hospital records are extremely sensitive, and stealing these records affects the patient not just financially, but may even cause their death.
These crimes affect doctors, medical staff, and patients alike because the records do not remain consistent. When doctors cannot correctly determine the patient's problem, it results in significant problems between them and the patients.
Following are the common ways criminals use to target the healthcare sector:
Data
Data involve the cybercriminal gaining illegal access to patient records from the hospital database and then using the stolen information to fake their identity. Data are a common crime because there is a lack of proper security systems in medical institutions.
Ransomware
Ransomware or computer virus is another technique that fraudsters use to manipulate the system. Usually, this is done using fake advertisements that automatically install ransomware in the user's computer when clicked on.
Identity theft
The information that criminals get from data involved and ransomware is then used for medical identity theft. The fraudster pretends to be a patient and sometimes successful gets in getting free drug prescriptions and insurance.
Phishing
Phishing involves spam emails that fool the patient to enter sensitive information assuming it to be the requirement of the medical institution. These emails seem legitimate and so do the usernames that are used to send them.
Data Security in Healthcare
It's now obvious that identity verification is the need of the hour when it comes to preventing medical identity theft and providing healthcare privacy and security. Just like banks and fintech companies are required to incorporate KYC (know your customer) services, hospitals also need to verify their patients' identities, and also their medical staff.
This can help in providing the required and correct medical treatment to legitimate patients while filtering out fraudsters at the same time. In many countries, KYP ( know your patient ) guidelines are now enforced by law, and failure to comply with these rules results in penalties for the medical institution. A law has also been formatted for digital ID verification for pharmaceuticals in the United Kingdom.
Laws To Prevent Healthcare Fraud
Certain rules and regulations have been enforced for the healthcare sector in order to get rid of medical identity theft. The doctors, management, medical staff, and patients need to be provided a secure environment where their data and health remain intact.
Patients that become the victim of medical identity theft go to the extremes and take the medical institutions to court because of the sensitive nature of these crimes. This is why the following regulations were formatted to prevent medical identity theft.
HIPAA
The health insurance portability and accountability act is a part of the law that includes these key points:
- Security
- Privacy
- Transaction
- Enforcement
- Employer identifier
NHS good practices
NHS good practices are used for online patient verification and for those patients that cannot verify themselves, their representatives are required to help them in online verification.
Final Thoughts
To summarize, medical identity theft is a rising crime that has serious consequences. Hospitals must ensure the implementation of online identity verification as part of KYP in order to rid themselves of this problem.