One patient nearly received a transfusion of the wrong kind of blood — a life-threatening mix up.
The cause? A bogus medical file that had been created by an identity thief. The criminal used the victim’s name to obtain medical care. The criminal’s blood type was recorded in the victim’s medical records, leading to the almost fatal mistake.
“It was a close call,” said Larry Ponemon, a national authority on identity fraud. Researching medical identity theft, Ponemon found that case and another instance where medical identity theft had placed a victim’s health in jeopardy. The second patient nearly got an inappropriate and unneeded procedure.
Ponemon, chairman of the Traverse City, Mich., Ponemon Institute, declined to provide the individuals’ names for privacy reasons.
“Those could have been deadly,” he said of the incidents.
Affecting an estimated 1.5 million Americans overall, according to estimates from Ponemon, medical identity theft poses a threat beyond the headaches associated with fixing financial fraud: The crime alters your medical records and can compromise your care.
Unlike financial ID theft — which can be flagged through credit bureaus — there is no central source for checking your medical records, according to the Federal Trade Commission, the federal consumer watchdog agency.
Medical providers say that federal law hamstrings ID theft victims from seeing files created in their name: That’s because medical records created about all patients — including identity thieves who use your name — are covered by privacy rules in the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, according to Lawrence Hughes, assistant general counsel for the American Hospital Association.
“You must protect all persons’ information — whether it is a real patient or a patient that has committed a case of identity theft,” Hughes said.
For America’s victims of medical ID theft, there is no system to identify and correct the damage left by an impostor. In fact, an investigation finds:
•Medical providers are refusing to give ID theft victims access to records, invoking the privacy rights of the thieves, according to victims, experts and hospital officials. The only way for this to change is for federal authorities to create explicit rules to help medical ID theft victims, some say.
Even when hospitals are alerted about erroneous medical files, they have no systematic way to fix the records, experts say.
The move toward networked electronic medical records — spurred by $19 billion from the 2009 economic recovery act — may amplify the threat that incorrect records spread “quickly and broadly,” according to a government-commissioned report.
The risk of inaccurate medical records is mushrooming. As the medical industry replaces paper files with linked, electronic databases, the potential harm from inaccurate patient information will cascade, ID theft experts and data security analysts warn.
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