Medical identity theft is on the rise, but many of the people who fall victim to it aren’t doing much about it, according to new data from the Ponemon Institute.
In the fourth installment of its annual Survey on Medical Identity Theft, the institute estimated that 1.8 million people would experience medical fraud in 2013, a 19 percent bump from last year, and it would cost them some $12 billion.
Most of the 788 adults in the survey who said they or a close family member had experienced medical fraud indicated that it was very important or important to control their health records directly. Yet more than half of them reported that they do not review their health records for accuracy because they don’t know how and they trust their providers to be accurate. Just as many also didn’t check their explanation of benefits from their insurers.
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That could be because more than a third of respondents said they experienced no financial consequences as a result of identity theft. For those that did, lost time and productivity and diminished credit scores were the most common financial impacts. About 40 percent said they lost health insurance as a result of the medical identity theft and had to make out-of-pocket payments to restore coverage.
A smaller percentage reported that inaccuracies in their medical records negatively affected their healthcare. Fifteen percent said it caused a misdiagnosis, and 11 percent said they were prescribed the wrong pharmaceutical. Still, though, half of respondents reported doing nothing to resolve the incident.
Survey results suggest that consumers largely put the sole responsibility of protecting their privacy and security on providers. Almost 60 percent of respondents said they would find another provider if they knew theirs could not safeguard their medical records. They wouldn’t be pleased, then, by a report released by Ponemon earlier this year which found that half of healthcare organizations surveyed weren’t confident in their abilities to detect all patient data loss or theft.
The survey, sponsored by the recently formed public/private Medical Identity Fraud Alliance with support from ID Experts, defined medical identify theft as use of an individual’s personal identity to fraudulently receive medical services, goods or prescription drugs.
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