Healthcare Related Breaches May Raise Your Blood Pressure

Last year, over 110 million people in the U.S. were victims of data breaches of healthcare organizations alone, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The largest, Anthem, resulted in information being stolen for 78 million people. That single one is reason enough to take notice.

Obviously, the healthcare industry needs to increase security measures for protecting our health data. As medical records become more and more electronicized, our information becomes more vulnerable and we all become more likely to be victims of identity theft and healthcare fraud.

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Take advantage of the free annual credit report every year to make sure suspicious items are not showing on them. Each of the three major credit bureaus will provide one at no charge to anyone with credit each year. You can get them from the sites individually or check the annualcreditreport.com website. Jim Stickley, of Stickley on Security, recommends ordering one of them every four months to ensure you keep better track of potential fraud. The sooner you find errors, the easier they are to resolve.

Take a look at those medical “benefit statements” each time you receive one. They list the type of medical care that was reported to your insurance provider. If you don’t understand it, call the medical care provider. If it still doesn’t sound right, make sure they didn’t make a mistake when billing it. Then, call the insurance provider to report it and follow through to make sure it was resolved.

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Never give out sensitive information via phone or on websites unless you are 100% certain the source at the other end is legitimate. If you did not initiate the contact, don’t provide credit card numbers or details, social security numbers, names, addresses, or any other identifying information.

Not only is our information vulnerable as medical technology improves, but health devices are also becoming more internet-connected. Remember that anything that connects to the Internet is vulnerable to hacking. This means, we need to worry even about devices such as pacemakers and insulin pumps as technology allows us to manage them via the Web. If you have such devices, take care of your login credentials. Don’t provide them to anyone and make sure they are unique to each site.

In other words, don’t reuse passwords across various sites. Hackers will often steal them and then try them on several sites. They are successful an alarming number of times. Password reuse has been blamed for many cyber incidents, including the “naked celebrity photo” one of recent history.

As of mid-December, according to HHS data, there have been 55 medical-related data breaches this year. The number of victims was nearly 112 million. That’s enough to increase your blood pressure. Now, go see your doctor about that. Then make sure you check your benefit statements.