Much is made of identity theft and medical identity theft. But, these are conscious efforts made by criminals. There is little talk about the threat that’s much closer to home and more likely to occur – that of medical mistaken identity. All you have to do is enter your own name in any search engine and you’ll find that there are more people with your name than you ever dreamed possible. And, you don’t have to be a Smith or a Jones to have this be so.

One of our SSC employees, Nancy, has experienced the danger of medical mistaken identity. She has received the wrong prescriptions on a number of occasions; prescriptions that should have gone to another Nancy with her same middle initial and last name. These errors included psychotropic drugs. Had she not realized the error, her life could have been jeopardized by taking them. And, think of the wasted money because the drugs had to be discarded. To boot, she recently found out that her gynecologist has nine patients with her same name and in roughly her same age group.

Medical mistaken identity can be stopped – today – with SSC’s SHAPE card.™ The SHAPE card boasts a biometric match-on-card that carries a representation of an individual’s fingerprint on the card – not in someone’s database. When a patient enters a doctor’s office, requests a medical service or logs on to a medical provider’s site using their SHAPE card and fingerprint they are positively identified, their health information is authenticated and they can be authorized – all in seconds.

In the case of our Nancy, there will be no one else in the world who can be confused for her. It is our goal – indeed our mission – to end medical mistaken identity. We have the technology and the products available and the cost is affordable.

SHAPE – Secure information at the tip of your finger.

The track record for efforts to establish formal health information exchange networks has shown promise. However, concerns about loss of competitive advantage and data misuse lessen provider and health plan willingness to contribute patient data – impeding the growth of exchange networks. This concern coupled with the costs associated with large scale data and information infrastructure has caused these efforts to flounder – or fail. Secure Service Corporation’s core philosophy and architectural design of our SHAPE^TM solutions provide the desired benefits of the exchange networks without the competitive disadvantages and costs associated with them.

The SSC Private Intellectual Architecture creates value by combining Security, Privacy, and Communication in a single environment. SHAPE Linx, our collaborative environment, meets the business needs of medical providers for HIPAA-compliant communications and increased savings and efficiency in transactions and administration. The SHAPE^TM suite of products fulfills the promise of health information exchange networks to providers with robust data protections unsurpassed in the marketplace and without the loss of competitive advantage.

While SSC’s products are technologically sophisticated and cryptographically state-of-the-art, the premise is a simple one that has so far eluded the competition. Everyone is familiar with the story of The Three Little Pigs . A system that protects only privacy can be thought of as a house made of straw. It provides privacy but it can’t stand up to the big bad wolves that are determined to breach it. A product that is built with privacy and security at the core is a house made of sticks. Better than straw – but still vulnerable.

Only SSC’s SHAPE suite of solutions built with privacy, security and surveillance tracking in a communication and collaboration environment at its core – a house made of bricks – can withstand the onslaught of the wolves and provide real value to healthcare stakeholders.

SHAPE – Secure information at the tip of your finger.