This post is in response to a recent article highlighting the rise of prescription fraud. I wanted to highlight some important aspects of the article.

Frequent incidences of prescription drug misuse:
1. Doctor shopping – hopping from doctor to doctor in order to receive medication and deceive the doctor. Patients also go doctor shopping to find a doctor that will “address” all their prescription needs i.e. over prescribing.
2. Manually changing the dose of the prescription. Example: If the prescription is written for 25 pills, they might add a 1 in front of it to make it 125 or a 0 at the end to make it 250.
3. Medical identity theft – stealing a victim’s insurance card and obtaining prescriptions under the victim’s name.
4. Inside cooperation – stealing a doctor’s prescription pad and writing prescriptions.

This list is by no means exhaustive. It just gives you a clue to what is occurring.

What are Pharmaceutical companies doing?
1. Making pills tamperproof – meaning that if they’re crushed for a stronger, more rapid high they become ineffective.
2. Patient medication guides explaining the exact purpose of the drugs and the consequences of misuse.
3. Letters to doctors and additional physician training to end the misuse and inappropriate prescribing of painkillers.

Those last 2 strategies are debatable, but they are necessary steps that need to be taken to combat prescription drug addiction.

How can providers combat the misuse?
1. Electronic health records can help combat this problem. The physician would be able to see that the patient has seen an abnormal amount of doctors and see what the patient was prescribed – eliminating the ability for a patient to be over prescribed.
2. Stop over prescribing – simple as that.
3. Understand the warning signs of users.

Read the full article here.

It would seem that having all your medical/health information in one place would be a good thing. You wouldn’t have to go from doctor to doctor requesting medical charts and cutting through red tape to access your “private” files. However, we all know from experience that the Internet is not always the safest place to store information – identity theft is running rampant throughout the country with thieves stealing your information right off of your personal computer.

President Obama, following former President Bush’s initiatives, is pushing for everyone to have an EHR or EMR by 2014 (EHR = Electronic Health Record, EMR = Electronic Medical Record). However the problem with this implementation is that currently, most hospitals do not have adequate safeguards to protect highly private and highly valuable medical information (medical identity information averages $50 per identity; a SSN will net thieves only $1).

In many cases, medical identity theft is committed by individuals with inside access to medical information – doctors, nurses, pharmacists, hospital workers etc. By allowing information to essentially “flow freely” throughout the healthcare marketplace we are opening ourselves up to fraudsters and thieves and making medical identity theft even easier than it was before.

According to the World Privacy Forum, 3% of all identity theft victims in the U.S. or 250,000 Americans reported that their identity had been used fraudulently to obtain medical treatment, services or supplies. The World Privacy Forum asserts that this number will only increase in the future.

While EHR adoption will push our country in the right direction in terms of quality of healthcare, what steps are we taking to prevent our most private information from being stolen and used against us?

The Virginia Prescription Monitoring Program website was breached in late April by a hacker demanding $10 million in return for the confidential medical information of 8.3 million patients.

The hacker posted on the site’s homepage an expletive filled rant claiming that he was in possession of very confidential data. He continued by writing that if Virginia didn’t follow his ransom demands, he would sell all the information to the highest bidder.

Virginia didn’t succumb to the hacker’s demands; however, their website was not functional for a period of time.

Read full article here.

This alleged breach calls into question the effectiveness and security of EHRs (Electronic Health Records). While EHRs will save an estimated $11 billion annually, skeptics say that patient information will be more vulnerable than ever.

Medical Business Associates, Inc. can consult companies and hospitals on the right way to secure online medical records. Our experts are trained to find holes and teach you the proper way to fill them. Our pre and post EHR implementation audits have saved many organizations from experiencing the headaches associated with EHR implementation.