Scam artists steal doctors' identities

The amount of information available about physicians, and the amount of money available in health care, can make doctors especially vulnerable.

By Cheryl Jackson, AMNews staff. Sept. 16, 2002.

Houston ob-gyn L. Natalie Carroll, MD, hadn't heard of physicians getting their identities stolen -- until the FBI agents appeared.

That's when Dr. Carroll learned that her billing service was on overdrive, and her name was being used. The biller Dr. Carroll and her husband, family physician Warren Dailey, MD, had hired in 1988 to collect for their separate solo practices, had been

The FBI agents "asked if I knew I had more than one Medicaid number and more than one Medicare number. I didn't realize this. I had no reason to know it," Dr. Carroll said.

"I'm in tears, because I was so upset. I could not believe that all this was happening and the FBI was sitting in my office. This is my name that this woman has impugned."

The FBI's investigation, begun in 1999, culminated in March when biller Joyce Lee Hickman was sentenced to 17 1/2 years of prison after conviction on 32 counts of health care fraud. But Dr. Carroll and Dr. Dailey are still out $1 million in lost billin

They're not alone. Many in the health care industry say physicians increasingly are a target of identity theft -- when someone else uses a physician's name or identification numbers, such as Social Security, DEA or Medicare -- though no one has yet don

Identity thieves "can bill for services. They can perform illegal acts for which you will be forced to prove your own innocence," said Jack Lewin, MD, executive vice president and CEO of the California Medical Assn. [...]