So my better half gets a letter in the mail from UT Southwestern Medical Center. It says that her personal information may have been stolen from there by somebody who used to work in the hospital’s patient financial services department. This person supposedly accessed “personal identifying information of patients who had made payments,” then gave the info to someone who intended to use it to apply for credit cards, loans and bank accounts. UT Southwestern cops are investigating.
The hospital doesn’t know exactly how many patients were affected by the scheme. So it’s notifying a bunch of people and urging them all to place a “fraud alert” on their credit files. It’s even arranged with one of the fraud-reporting companies to offer identity-theft protection to the potential victims “at no cost for one year.” And, here’s a nice P.S.: the letter containing all this bad news arrived in an envelope that was open, looking like it had never been sealed.
10 comments
I think this may also be fraud. My life is stressful enough without this. I think we shall ignore and hope for the best. My husband has 5 doctors at the med school and we trusted them.
Wonder if the workers signed HIIPA confidentiality forms, which I think they have to sign. UT is right to inform you. Your credit card company will probably close your account and issue a new one, but keep an eye on all the charges. Citibank just closed one of our accounts due to security compromise and I spent one afternoon calling all our auto-charges, giving them the new number. Now to make a plug for health care reform:when hospitals and physicians have reimbursements whittled down so they barely cover their cost of doing business, they have to dip into a cheaper pool of employees. Medicare, for example, reimburses so low I’ve heard doctors say it covers a tenth of their overhead. That, of course, has nothing to do with employee theft and fraud — that happens at all salary levels. But you will see less skilled, inexperienced workers at all levels in health care from clerical to nursing. What I’m most concerned about is your social security number since so many insurers use it as an identifying number for patients.
Doesn’t someone a little higher up the law enforcement ladder than campus cops investigate identity-theft?
Most major hospitals have a division of the Dallas cops on campus. I work at another major hospital in the city and all our hospital security are Dallas cops with all the same credentials.
I got this letter on Tues and it was sealed. Since I didn’t get a call by telephone — which they did for the 29 that they knew had info get outside to a 3rd party — I could know that I was part of the other 179 accts they were unsure of.
The letter was very well put together, they took full responsibility, there is no untoward activity on my credit report, and the free credit watch for a year is great. I thought that they did an all-around great job handling it.
UT Southwestern has their own police department and having had to deal with the investigator assigned to this issue, I assure you that they are heads and tails above their peers. I am more concerned with the fact that this issue happened in September and I only just now received a notification letter.
A couple years back Neimans credit card information was compromised and this year when I filed for unemployment (ugh) I found out that someone was using my ss# to work at a dry cleaners in Arizona. An arrest has since been made but you must be careful with your information. I would have never known this person was using my identify if I wasn’t filing for unemployment. Hopefully I won’t get billed from the IRS for taxes not paid on her earnings.
I hears from a buddy there ( in acct ) he’s never even heard of anyone being given a background check. With so much lateral movement between depts, it sounds like it’s time to clean house!
I am concerned with several things actually..
1) my letter said she had no known criminal past, yet the news reports that the person who hired her knew she had a misdemeanor theft charge.
2) they think it was comforting to say…she had no access to my medical records…I would have preferred she had those instead of my personal info.
3) they knew about this since September and just notified me!!! While so far I have taken steps to stop it, who is to say it hasn’t started.
4)I appreciate the fraud alert and monitoring they are providing, but had they done their job in the first place and checked her background we wouldn’t be in this mess!!!
I can honestly say I will not ever be a patient in their hospital ever again if this is how they show that our info is confidential….ha it isn’t worth the paper it is written on!!!
I wonder if this is part of the same ring and are we getting the whole story? http://abclocal.go.com/ktrk/story?section=news/local&id=7323298