Home Health & Hospice Week

Take these steps to safeguard against medical identity theft. As a healthcare provider, you are likely acutely aware of the importance of patient privacy -- but you may not know all of the new ways that thieves are trying to steal it from you. Generally medical ID theft occurs two ways. Either it occurs from the inside where employees are involved or it occurs at point of care where patients are posing as someone else for the purpose of gaining expensive treatments or drugs without having to pay for them, information security expert Ester Horowitz tells Eli. The bad news is that often "the very people we trust the most are actually the ones committing the fraud and it could have been going on for years," she warns. Illicit cash: When medical ID theft is an inside job, "it means that someone who works for a covered entity is taking the [...]