Study also finds that half of these victims were subject to medical identity theft and on average had to pay $2,500 in out-of-pocket costs per incident.

Twenty-six percent of U.S. consumers have had their personal medical information stolen from healthcare information systems, according to results of a new study from Accenture released at HIMSS17 in Orlando.

Among those who experienced a breach, 50 percent were victims of medical identity theft, the survey found. Most often, the stolen identity was used to purchase items (cited by 37 percent of data-breached respondents) or used for fraudulent activities, such as billing for care (37 percent) or filling prescriptions (26 percent). The victims had to pay approximately $2,500 in out-of-pocket costs per incident, on average.

In addition, the survey of 2,000 U.S. consumers found that the breaches were most likely to occur in hospitals (the location cited by 36 percent of respondents who experienced a breach), followed by urgent-care clinics (22 percent), pharmacies (22 percent), physicians’ offices (21 percent) and health insurers (21 percent).

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By Bill Siwicki, Healthcare IT News, February 20, 2017