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Security, Medical Security, Identity Theft

Modern medicine is facing a complex environment, not from medical technology but rather government regulations and information vulnerability. HIPPA is the government’s attempt to protect patient’s information yet this only addresses traditional record handling. The main threat is from the evolving security issues. Many medical offices and facilities have multiple areas of information security concerns. Physical security is often weak, office personnel are not always aware of security needs and application security and transmission protocols are not consistently maintained. Health insurance needs and general financial opportunity has created an emerging market in medical identity theft. Medical offices have the perfect storm of information collection, personal, credit, banking, health, and insurance. Thieves have realized that medical facilities have as much economic value as banks and the security is much easier to crack. Mostly committed by insiders, medical identity theft is a well-hidden information crime. In spite of its covert nature, the catastrophic ramification to the victims is overt. This information crime involves stealing patients’ records to impersonate the patients in an effort of obtaining health care services or claiming Medicare on the patients’ behalf. Unlike financial identity theft, there is a lack of recourse for the victims to recover from damages. Medical identity theft undermines the quality of health care information systems and enervates the information security of electronic patient record.