Card culture
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| Mary Stevens, editor, CMIO magazine |
In many lines of work, a photo ID is required. In contrast, many of the cards that are used to identify patients have no embedded token or smartcard technology, let alone a picture of the patient. This was one sobering assessment by Larry Ponemon, PhD, chairman and founder of the Ponemon Institute, who presented the institute’s newest research into the state of medical identity theft earlier this week.
Healthcare providers are under increasing burden to authenticate their patients, but they may have limited options in stopping identity theft at the point of care.
If there’s a suspicious activity i.e., someone shows up with an obviously female name who is obviously male—that can be stopped at the gate immediately, said Ponemon. But less obvious cases will be harder to stop.
"We can do really a good job of identifying someone who’s an employee or a customer. We should apply the same rigor to make sure that when someone comes in for treatment, that that card is associated appropriately with that individual," he said. "Even though mistakes will be made and errors will occur, that will probably reduce a very significant number of these criminal acts.”
This is an important point, because until medical identity theft is taken more seriously as a crime, any mistakes and errors on the provider’s or payor’s part will likely get a lot more attention than any effort to quantify the number of thefts that are prevented. Most medical identity theft involves family ties, in which one family member might need care but isn't insured. A number of medical identity theft “victims” in the Ponemon survey admitted allowing this to happen because doing so wasn't seen as a serious crime with lasting consequences, he said.
Now that may be changing: Ponemon’s research shows that medical identity theft is getting more attention from criminal rings, he said. “It gets back to [creating] laminated cards that look like the real thing. Those kinds of activities are usually not just two people working in a kitchen somewhere—normally it involves larger groups of people. There’s a profit to be made by creating false identity, and [a bogus medical card can] be used for other purposes because it’s an identifier.”
What is the state of patient identity at the point of care in your organization? Let me know at mstevens@trimedmedia.com. And don’t forget to take the CMIO Health IT Top Trends Survey—you could win an Apple iPad 2 for your efforts. Click here for more information.
Mary Stevens, editor
mstevens@trimedmedia.com