On Bloomberg’s Tech Blog, Jordan Peterson has been regularly hammering away and exposing, piece by piece, the privacy concerns that could arise from widespread adoption of electronic medical records. His latest piece addresses medical identity theft, and opens with a simple explanation of just how serious it can be.
Webcast: The status of health IT in your community
Farzad
Mostashari
Join us online on Tuesday, Aug. 7, at noon ET for an exclusive on-the-record conversation with Farzad Mostashari, M.D., national coordinator for health information technology, and other officials with the HHS Office of National Coordinator for Health Information Technology.
View and learn how to use an updated “Health IT Dashboard” to find local-level information about where Federal Recovery Act dollars are being spent on health IT programs, the percentage of doctors and hospitals adopting electronic health records, and how many doctors and pharmacies are using electronic prescribing tools.
This is an AHCJ members-only opportunity to learn about health IT and its impact on providers and patients in their own communities.
If your credit card is stolen, it may take a few minutes on the phone with the bank to reverse the fraudulent charges.
But if your identity is stolen and used for medical treatment, it could take a year or longer to undo the damage, a new study released today found. Victims may also get dropped by their insurance provider and end up paying the imposter’s bills just to make the problem go away, potentially to the tune of $100,000 or more.
According to the study, which was commissioned by an identity theft protection outfit, 1.85 million people could be affected by medical ID theft, which is estimated to cost the U.S. economy $41.3 billion this year. According to the article, 41 percent of respondents lost their insurance as a result of the theft, and 45 percent said they simply paid the fraudulent bill in order to make the problem go away rather than commit to the yearlong process of properly resolving it.
And, most, remarkably, Robertson writes, “Thirty-one percent of the survey respondents said they let family members use their information to obtain medical care, up from 26 percent last year. Most said it was because their family members were uninsured, couldn’t afford care or were experiencing a medical emergency.”
Other relevant posts in the ongoing series include:
