The healthcare industry is quite complicated and has to deal with a lot of critical information about patients. This makes it crucial to collect and manage all the identity-related data to verify patient identity for compliance regulations such as HIPAA, HITECH, FCA, and many others, to minimize medical identity theft and other Know Your Patient requirements. Identity theft is terribly affecting almost every industry, and as result, businesses have to bear huge losses. In the United States, 15 million people were victims of identity theft in 2021, and a total of $24 billion was lost. It is the time when the health sector has to think about precautionary measures against identity theft.
What is Know Your Patient (KYP)?
To comply with HIPAA, FCA, HITECH, EMTALA, and other regulatory standards, the healthcare sector prioritizes patient data protection. In this highly developed digital time, compliance with regulations is not acceptable for security. A large amount of valuable and sensitive data can be found in medical records, making healthcare businesses a potential target for cybercrime. Offering online patient verification, KYP, or identity verification screening of patients is called upon to secure online operations.
Most sectors today use digital methods to confirm the identities of their clients. With the help of KYC solutions, the healthcare industry has efficiently improved services and secured all types of patient identity information.
Importance of Know Your Patient
Keeping that in mind the concept of Know Your Customer (KYC), is mainly used in financial organizations and banking sectors for customers’ identification and verification not only by providing protection against identity fraud, and removing money laundering risks for companies but to comply with national jurisdictions and standards. Similarly, there is an urgent need to take some measures that can eliminate the identity theft risk, moving forward with the concept of eKYC, Know Your Patient (KYP) has the same importance in the healthcare industry.
Combating cybercriminals, data breaches, and prescription fraud should be the primary concern of knowing your customer. Provide prescriptions, test results, reports, and documents to the patient by ensuring the customer’s identity and implementing efficient processes. Fraudsters attempt to penetrate the hospital’s security system by using the true identity of the patient to gain access to the data relevant to the identity, which is subsequently utilized for harmful purposes that may put the patient at risk.
Know Your Patient (KYP) Process
Identity Verification: The patient makes use of the camera on their smartphone or web camera devices to present their ID document with a photo. By comparing the data from Identity documents with the information provided by the patient upon registration, the AI-based KYP system verifies the identity and face. Organizations can confirm fake or altered documents and their requirements.
Patient Age Verification: The identity verification systems allow the confirmation of a valid date of birth.
Biometric Identification: A liveness detection tool is used to verify the legitimacy of individuals taking part in online screening processes.
Compiling It: After the verification process is completed, the system’s database is updated according to the finalized results about the users and notifies them about their status.
Age Verification Before Providing Prescribed Medicines
In the United Kingdom, pharmacies providing online services need to verify the age of customers according to the General Pharmaceutical Council (GPC) guidelines. Compliance with such regulations is essential and secure for pharmacies and patients. Sometimes, minors use adults’ prescriptions for drugs and the ill-usage of prescriptions can lead the minors to drug addiction and might be possible to death. This is because ID verification for pharmacies and other health care sectors become essential.
How does Know Your Patient (KYP) Work?
Identity Verification for HIPAA Rules
Several legislative guidelines in the healthcare sector ensure that electronic records are created and handled effectively.
Creating and maintaining electronic records is made easier and more convenient by HIPAA regulations, which ensure their integrity and proper use.
Combat Medical Identity Theft
Unfortunately, millions of healthcare records are impacted by medical data breaches every year in the US alone. Since fraudsters possess information that can be used to obtain medical services.
Enhanced Patient Identification
Digital healthcare services are being used widely. The demand for accurate and quick digital identity verification is growing as the digital healthcare sectors become more streamlined and common.
Final Thoughts
In the healthcare industry, verifying patient identity is a remarkable method to combat identity theft. An artificial intelligence model is used to ensure that fraud is less likely to happen with the help of verification services. The reputation of the healthcare sector relies on verification standards like the Know Your Patient (KYP) solution.