Educate your patients about playing an active role in fighting medical identity theft, make your policies tougher, and take a proactive approach to minimize the increasing risk, experts say.

Booz Allen Hamilton, a McLean, VA–based firm that was commissioned in 2008 by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology to research medical identity theft in the United States, says all facilities can adopt the following strategies: 

The idea began as a joke. Mary Thomson, vice president of marketing and PR at Abington (PA) Memorial Hospital, was talking to a specialist about the difficulties of contacting referring physicians to thank them for sending new patients. “You should have your top five referrers as your fab five in your phone,” she laughed. Her quip then sparked an idea. 

The Recovery Audit Contractor (RAC) program has caused a lot of apprehension in the provider community. In response, many providers have elected to develop RAC teams to assess the risk to their organization prior to the beginning of the program and to handle requests once the program is under way. However, if not done carefully, a RAC team can end up pulling resources from other needed areas of the hospital in a disproportionate level to the threat posed by RAC recoupments. A carefully designed RAC team can minimize the effect on the hospital from both RAC recoupments and inefficient use of resources, including valuable staff and physician time. 

The secret to high-deductible health plans (HDHP) and consumer-driven health plans (CDHP) seems simple enough: Collect the amount due while the patient is in your facility.