White Papers for Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)

Secure Healthcare Banking: The Critical Step of Identity Verification

Personix

Online authentication methods, no matter how sophisticated, are useless in preventing fraud unless the identity of the user has been verified to a reasonable degree of certainty before sign-on credentials are issued.Medical costs are increasing, and healthcare payers and providers alike are searching for ways to reduce their administration costs. One outstanding example of cost savings is healthcare banking, which integrates healthcare payment processes with network access to the banking infrastructure to lower administrative costs. But online security is an issue, especially when using Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT) to deposit payments into a healthcare provider’s bank account. To improve security, there has been significant industry and regulatory emphasis on stronger authentication methods that use multiple identity factors at time of sign-on. Yet insufficient attention is being paid to proving the identity of a provider, and the authenticity of the information they provide, before sign-on credentials are issued. Furthermore, the online sign-up processes typically used to collect the bank account information required for EFT transactions increase the opportunity for both identity and account theft. Simply put, multi-factor authentication at sign-on is insufficient to ensure security for healthcare banking. Multi-factor identity verification during account origination must also be implemented before the security of online financial transactions can be significantly improved.

View the White Paper

Share or bookmarklet this web page at: