The healthcare sector is facing identity fraud, medical scams, data breaches, false insurance claims, and illegitimate onboarding. While medical care providers are striving to bring convenience and digital treatments to patients, criminals are using sophisticated ways to exploit benefits. For instance, they commit data breaches, create counterfeit profiles, and illegitimately avail medical treatments.
Medicare centres need to integrate better patient verification mechanisms to not only streamline the user onboarding and treatment process but also provide security to their records. Regulatory authorities are also enforcing new requirements for information protection. Therefore, medicare providers should enhance their patient identity verification controls. This article sheds light on how digital IDV solutions help healthcare providers improve their services.
Highlighting Increasing Threats in the Healthcare Sector
Digitisation is bringing various shifts in the healthcare sector like the introduction of telemedicine. However, criminals are using advanced methods to illegitimately reap the benefits. Considering this, regulatory authorities are enforcing several restrictions for healthcare services providers such as accurate patient verification, data security, and ongoing monitoring.
As per guidelines by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), medical centres should collect, analyse, and protect patient information. This calls for better and more efficient IDV mechanisms that are capable of deterring modern fraud attempts.
Know your patient solutions offer error-free and accurate tools to verify patient identity and restrict imposters from exploiting medical benefits. While criminals use fake credentials to avail insurance coverage, pay for expensive treatments, and buy restricted drugs, AI-powered IDV services deter their malicious intentions in real-time. ID verification for pharmacies and other healthcare affiliates further helps counter the following major threats:
Medical Records Breaches
The medical records, payment details, insurance data, and other such information is worth a fortune to fraudsters. This is because the data can be sold at high prices on the dark web or criminals might misuse it fir availing self benfits. According to the stats by HIPAA, global healthcare sectors faced more than 44 million medical data breaches in 2021.
Global regulatory bodies are enacting more strict restrictions on medicare providers to verify patient identity and combat criminal attempts. Moreover, not just the hospital but also other subsidiaries need to perform accurate identification. Healthcare centres with robust AI-powered IDV tools will face fewer issues while identifying patients.
Increase in Cyberattacks
Considering the change brought by digitisation, healthcare providers are bringing innovation to their operations. Patients can now upload their prescriptions and order medicine online, also they can schedule a virtual check-up. However, these shifts are raising other threats such as cyberattacks.
Medicare providers are using technologically advanced gadgets to verify patient identity and access their records. Furthermore, they prevent unauthorised access which leaves less room for criminal exploitation.
Security Hacks Reaches Alarming Stage
While digital transformations have a myriad of advantages, they also have a few downsides. These shifts are opening loopholes for criminals to dodge patient identity checks and compromise security protocols. Criminals are using different methods to get their hands on confidential information and avail illegal benefits which leave legitimate users with rights deprivation.
Minors are using their elders’ information and documents to buy medicines online which exposes them to fatal consequences. Therefore, the healthcare sector should accurately verify patient identity along with their age to ensure medical services.
Benefits of Integrating IDV Checks to Identify Patients
The healthcare industry faces various challenges in providing a better experience while safeguarding data from external breaches. For this, they need to integrate efficient patient verification solutions. This is because they offer convenience, authenticity, and security. More of the benefits are discussed later on.
Reduces Inaccurate and Mistyped Information
In manual data entry and verification, there are high chances of mistyped or inaccurate information. This leads to damaging concerns like inappropriate treatments and the wrong allocation of benefits. Moreover, medical records and case histories are hard to change which is why precautions should be taken in the beginning. IDV solutions help a great deal in identifying patients and safeguarding medical databases.
Accurately Identity Verification
Various authorities like HIPAA and HITECH are made in charge by states to enforce patient verification regulations. The requirements mandate all medical centres, pharmacies, and their affiliates to identify users before giving them any treatments. With know your patient solutions in place, healthcare service providers can accurately verify individuals and stay compliant with obligations.
Conclusion
Fraudsters use counterfeit data to avail medical benefits and deprive legitimate individuals of their rights. They take over users’ accounts to apply for false insurance claims or pay for costly treatments. Therefore, the healthcare sector and all its affiliates should accurately identify patient identities. As per regulations, accurate ID verification is an obligation and in case of non-compliance, medicare centres can face high penalties. Hence, patient verification solutions are the safety nets for healthcare service providers against scams, cyber security threats, and other such risks.