The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONCHIT), part of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), has awarded approximately $450,000 to Booz Allen Hamilton, a strategy and consulting technology firm, to assess and evaluate the scope of the medical identity theft problem in the United States.
The purpose of the project is to consider the intersection of health IT and medical identity theft, including examining how health IT can be used to detect and prevent medical identity theft, according to ONCHIT.
Full story – HealthImagingNews
Comment: While this is welcome news because we need more information on the scope of medical identity theft, I wonder how much access to data the company will get. There have been a number of Medicare or Medicaid fraud cases where I’ve wondered how the perpetrators obtained the patients’ info that was used for fraudulent billing purposes, but prosecutors have generally been reluctant to include such information in their press releases or when asked about this question — the Cleveland Clinic case being somewhat of an exception.