Medical identity theft is a serious concern that could have a big impact on your employees finances and their health. By offering Allstate Identity Protection as a benefit, your employees can access comprehensive features designed to help them protect their sensitive information, like our Dark Web Monitoring and Credit Monitoring. Plus, they'll know that should the worst occur, they can rely on our generous identity theft reimbursement and 24/7 remediation support.
Did you know certain types of identity theft can be more damaging than others? Identity theft involving medical records is on the rise and can be particularly challenging to overcome.
For one thing, it’s expensive: the average case carries a cost of $22,346. Medical identity theft also poses alarming health risks. If false information from fraud winds up in a victim’s health records, the results — such as delayed treatments or misdiagnoses — could be life-threatening.
The healthcare industry is a common target for cybercriminals. In fact, healthcare analytics researcher Protenus reports that in the first half of 2021 saw a record number of healthcare data breaches and by the end of the year the industry experienced a 44% increase in hacking incidents.
Luckily, by partnering with Allstate Identity Protection, you're already taking steps to protect your clients and employees. Read on to learn more about this type of fraud — and the pros of offering Allstate Identity Protection as a benefit.
How does medical identity theft occur?
Traditionally, medical identity theft happens when a thief gains access to a person’s healthcare or medical accounts. From there, the imposter may seek care in someone else’s name, make insurance claims on procedures that never happened, defraud government programs, or use phony credentials to order medical supplies or drugs.
If your employees are targeted in such a scheme, they could wind up footing the bill for treatment they never received — or worse, their medical files could be altered without their knowledge.
What’s more, the rise of synthetic identities may mean more cases of medical identity theft are flying under the radar. For example, a synthetic identity grown from a healthy person’s PII might go years before being detected. In that time, many fraudulent procedures, treatments, and pharmaceuticals could be ordered and claimed, building a false but legitimate-looking medical history.
How can Allstate Identity Protection help?
Allstate Identity Protection’s key features — such as 24/7 fraud remediation, Social Media Account Takeover Monitoring, and Credit Monitoring — were designed to help safeguard our members from a wide range of threat scenarios. Here are five of the ways we address medical identity theft in particular:
1. Our solutions meet and exceed the latest accreditation requirements.
You can’t control the security practices of the hospital systems and healthcare networks that serve your employees. But you can help protect enrollees from medical identity theft with an identity and privacy protection benefit that takes security seriously. That’s why we maintain SSAE-18 SOC2 Type II accreditation, updating our certification every year.
2. When medical identity theft does happen, we own the recovery process.
It’s one thing to alert someone to a problem with the security of their data. Solving that problem can be a bigger challenge. When an employee has their identity stolen, we assign them a dedicated Restoration Specialist to help with recovery. From there, our team owns the remediation process as much as possible, submitting and tracking what we can on our members’ behalf until their identity is restored.
3. Our generous family plan provides additional peace of mind.
It doesn’t matter if it’s your employee, their spouse, or their child whose medical identity is stolen. The end result is the same: emotional and financial burdens that affect both personal lives and workplace productivity. That’s why protecting your employees should mean coverage for their families, too. Allstate Identity Protection’s generous definition of family includes adult children, parents, in-laws, other dependents, and even deceased family members.
4. Our reimbursement policy protects members’ emotional and financial well-being.
When medical identity theft strikes, alerts and notifications alone won’t stop an employee from stressing over the potential for high out-of-pocket costs. Our up to $1M identity theft expense reimbursement aims to keep those emotional and financial stressors out of the workplace.
5. Our features are designed to reveal leaked data before medical identity theft occurs.
Account takeovers and synthetic identity fraud are two common precursors to medical identity theft. Our Social Media Account Takeover Monitoring feature makes it easy for members to spot common account takeovers, while our Dark Web Monitoring tool reveals stolen PII that could indicate the existence of a synthetic identity. When it comes to identity theft, every second counts. Quick action may prevent the worst of the damage.
Your best defense against medical identity theft
Help employees up their defenses by sharing these tips for making the most of Allstate Identity Protection:
Visit the portal and add important information, like email addresses associated with your healthcare accounts, to our Dark Web Monitoring tool
While in the portal, visit the Credit Monitoring tab to switch on our Credit Monitoring feature for an extra layer of protection
Finally, tap the Social Media Account Takeover Monitoring tab to sync Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts for monitoring
Medical identity theft may seem scary, but with Allstate Identity Protection, your employees have a partner in protection.
