"Dietrich" tracked by medical bills

(CBS) LOS ANGELES A 26-year-old man was in custody Friday after being on the run for more than a year following a high-speed crash in Malibu that left a rare $1 million Ferrari Enzo in pieces.

The driver of the Ferrari, Swedish national Stefan Eriksson, had previously claimed that a mysterious German man named "Dietrich" had been driving when the collision with the utility pole occurred. Eriksson failed two alcohol breath tests at the scene of the crash, and was later charged with embezzlement related to leased car exports and his video game firm Gizmondo.

Irish native Kearney, who was a passenger in the Ferrari Enzo during the crash, fled the country after the crash but was smuggled back into the U.S. a year later from Tijuana, Mexico.

Authorities tracked him down this week, thanks to medical bills generated after his return to California and sent to a Marina del Rey address, the source said.

Kearney was charged with perjury and obstructing, both misdemeanor crimes. Why would police track this man via medical bills for two misdemeanors? In order to force him to testify against Eriksson in a media-frenzy drunk driving case, undoubtedly.

Medical records are an open book to anyone with a subpoena. All too often medical professionals allow access to records after only an informal request from a detective or investigator. More troubling is the ease with which private investigators and other outside parties seem to get medical records via bribery, pretexting, or court-ordered legal discovery.

If Kearney hadn't had his medical bills sent to his address of record -- the address he gave to police investigators at the crash site -- he might not be under indictment for two misdemeanors today.

Remember, also, that lying to police is usually a misdemeanor and lying to federal agents is a felony. Just ask Martha Stewart.

Read the Findlaw article "How to Avoid Going to Jail under 18 U.S.C. Section 1001 for Lying to Government Agents" for more information on lies within federal jurisdiction and how to decline a federal interview by invoking counsel.

Prescription Records for Sale

In January 2007, the new National ePrescribing Patient Safety Initiative (NEPSI) debuted with a high-profile article in Time magazine.

This web-based system is supplied free of charge to physicians, ostensibly to reduce prescription error rates. Revenue to pay for the information system comes from the participating pharmacies and insurers who save time and money.

Now there are accusations that this database has been developed to give drug marketers, insurance risk assessors, and employers access to patients' private prescription records.

According to a Government Health IT article, all the prescription records stored in the new NEPSI database are for sale:

Security makes little difference because every identifiable prescription in the country is data mined and sold daily. Nobody needs to break into pharmacies to steal our prescriptions; they are for sale. For example, market intelligence firm IMS Health reported revenues of $1.75 billion in 2005 solely from the sale of prescription records, primarily to drug companies.

In another article, Dr. Peel says that NEPSI sells data to large employers:

In 2006, the national Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association announced its Blue Health Initiative to aggregate and sell the claims, medical and prescription data of all 79 million enrollees to large employers. This database will include far more detail than e-prescription records, making the sales of Blues data worth far more than the billions in revenue from selling e-prescription records alone.

But Allscripts CEO Tullman denies that prescription data will be misused:

Patients and physicians will have unique access to all the information. It's not our data. We don't claim it's our data. [...] Google will have no access to data we receive as part of the electronic prescribing process.

What can you do?

Ask your medical care providers if they use the web-based NEPSI electronic prescription system.

Consider refusing prescriptions for conditions that you would not want your employers or government to know about. Some doctors will give out samples to their patients, and this might be a sufficient quantity to forgo a formal prescription.

A cash transaction by itself won't keep you out of the NEPSI database because it contains patient information and the prescription itself, not just billing information like an insurer's database might.

Medical Identity Theft

From the January 8, 2007 issue of Businessweek, an article about medical identity theft and health care databases:

But some privacy advocates fear that the rush toward digital health records could ironically create new nightmares for victims of medical ID theft. Rather than residing in a single doctor's paper files, fraudulent information—such as the erroneous diabetes diagnosis in Lind Weaver's records—could circulate in other medical databases across the country. Given that some medical ID thefts are "inside jobs," wherein rogue clerks sell patient data to fraudsters on the outside, privacy advocates believe that allowing data to flow more freely around a national network could make such thefts even easier. "We can expect [medical ID theft] to grow the more we move toward an electronic health-care system. It's going to be a disaster," says Dr. Deborah Peel, an Austin (Tex.) psychiatrist and founder of the Patient Privacy Rights Foundation.

...but, as usual, the weakest link is usually a human:

In September, federal authorities arrested a scheduling clerk at the Cleveland Clinic's Weston (Fla.) hospital who allegedly had passed on the personal identification information of more than 1,100 patients to her cousin—who in turn submitted $2.8 million in false claims to Medicare. "Hospitals have done a poor job of implementing security procedures on their computer systems," says one federal investigator. "You'd be astonished how many people have access to your medical records."