New Patients and Fraudsters Flock to Telehealth During Pandemic

As more consumer-facing offerings have experienced incredible success provisioning services online (across banking, retail, travel, etc.), the healthcare industry has been slower to embrace digital transformation. This is partially due to a lack of patient awareness. However, even early adopters who did book an online doctor appointment found themselves navigating outdated processes and systems, including clunky HIPAA-compliant video conferencing tools, resulting in a clunky overall experience.

When the pandemic put an indefinite hold on in-person doctor’s office visits, there was heightened consumer need, but the poor digital experience continued. The overwhelming majority of patients who had not participated in a remote telemedicine appointment were now faced with signing up for and using cumbersome video teleconferencing tools purpose-built for the health services industry and its strict data privacy requirements.

Shortly thereafter, Health and Human Services (HHS) stepped in to ease restrictions on the tools the medical community could use to host patient/provider sessions, making remote care easier for all involved. HHS announced that covered healthcare providers could now use popular applications including Apple FaceTime, Facebook Messenger video chat, Google Hangouts video, Zoom, or Skype, to provide telehealth services.

As telemedicine became more flexible, this touched off a massive spike in the number of patients taking advantage of the new access channels. Unfortunately, the dramatic growth in the use of remote health services also ushered in an attractive opportunity for fraudsters, with so many individuals signing up for online services from their existing physicians, or opting to try out pure digital services such as teledoc.com and doctor.com. Drilling down, both of these web platforms have a rigorous onboarding process which creates an opportunity for bad actors to intercept sensitive personal information, including government-issued identification and medical insurance cards. One scam reported by the HHS involved fraudsters targeting beneficiaries via text messages, social media, and telemarketing, offering COVID-19 tests and requesting personal information like Medicare ID numbers that could then be used for committing medical identity theft.

Frost and Sullivan reported that the telehealth market is likely to experience massive growth in 2020, resulting in a year-over-year increase of 64.3%. And, as that popularity of telemedicine continues to grow, so will the opportunities and schemes involving fraudulent activity. Inevitably, this will require health services providers to embrace new, more advanced tools that can quickly scale and accurately verify a patient’s identity.

The Socure Solution

Fraud attacks in health services can occur across multiple channels: online, via telephone call or text, and in-person. To safeguard against  bad actors gaining access to the system,  providers must be able to efficiently and accurately ensure the person presenting themselves, in any situation, is who they say they are. DocV from Socure is the fully-automated, omnichannel document verification service that helps the industry address this critical challenge.

The most scalable, accurate, and customer experience-centric document verification service available, DocV authenticates users with minimal friction by guiding them through a user error-proof verification process right from their phones. DocV applies advanced analytics to quickly confirm the authenticity of almost any government-issued document in circulation, including more than 3,500 identification types from around the world. An additional layer of accuracy matches a photo of a consumer’s identification with a selfie in under 15 seconds. This entire process can be facilitated through the single Socure ID+ modular API, providing an enhanced layer of trust with ease and efficiency. And, because the service is 100% software-driven, no manual reviews are required.

Importantly, to further help our health services customers manage risk and meet their compliance objectives, Socure has attained HITRUST Common Security Framework (CSF) certification. HITRUST CSF is a certifiable framework that provides organizations with a comprehensive, flexible, and efficient approach to regulatory compliance and risk management. Developed in collaboration with data protection professionals, the HITRUST CSF rationalizes relevant regulations and standards into a single overarching security and privacy framework.

Let us show you how to improve the accuracy of your online patient identity verification by signing up for  a demo or contacting us directly at salesinfo@socure.com.