Biometric Technology Combats Medical Identity Theft

When a Columbus (Ohio) man was indicted by a grand jury in April on identity theft charges, the case had nothing to do with stolen credit cards or bank accounts. Instead, police say the suspect, who pleaded not guilty, used a South Carolina man’s identity to obtain more than $300,000 in treatment at Ohio State University’s Wexner Medical Center.

Data breaches at hospitals may cost the U.S. health-care industry as much as $7 billion a year, according to the Ponemon Institute, a Michigan-based organization that studies privacy, data protection, and security. And that doesn’t count the unknown cost of fraudulent use of information from lost or stolen insurance cards and drivers licenses. HCA Holdings hospitals in London and many U.S. providers have a solution: using biometric technology to verify patient identities. “If you don’t have a good way of authenticating legitimate users,” says Ponemon Chairman Larry Ponemon, “whatever you do on the other side isn’t going to be good enough.”