WPF leading Senior ID Theft Workshop for LA County Social Workers

Senior ID Theft and Privacy — Pam Dixon speaks to Los Angeles County social workers and financial abuse support teams today to share WPF’s wealth of information about medical identity theft and how this crime impacts seniors. The talk is titled Senior ID Theft – Issues, Causes, and Cures. WISE and Healthy Aging is hosting this important meeting.

Key tips for caregivers and those working with seniors include:

Keep good records of all health care-related visits, and take care to match the date of the visit(s) with the billing records. This is true for public and private insurance. This is an important tip, because if there is a problem, this is often the most effective way to find it.
Also look for billings for medical goods or services that were not received.
Once or twice a year, call the insurer and proactively request a printout of all medical goods and services that were received. This printout needs to match your records.
As you go through health care visits for eye, dental, and other, make a written request for the senior’s medical record. It is important to create a baseline of correct information about medications and conditions. Medical ID theft is notorious for introducing errors into health care files. If you have a copy before there is a problem, it is of inestimable help.
If the senior you are caring for is in a residential facility, keep close tabs on all on-site medical visits, and insist on secure storage of health care billing information and medicare information. For example, this material should be kept in a locked file and secured area, or if electronic, password protected and encrypted and accessible only to qualified staff and personnel. In some instances caregivers at residential facilities have reported lax security standards.

See our medical identity theft resource page for detailed consumer tips and other resources.

Posted March 27, 2013 in

New Report: Risky Analysis: Assessing and Improving AI Governance Tools

We are pleased to announce the publication of a new WPF report, “Risky Analysis: Assessing and Improving AI Governance Tools.” This report sets out a definition of AI governance tools, documents why and how these tools are critically important for trustworthy AI, and where these tools are around the world. The report also documents problems in some AI governance tools themselves, and suggests pathways to improve AI governance tools and create an evaluative environment to measure their effectiveness. AI systems should not be deployed without simultaneously evaluating the potential adverse impacts of such systems and mitigating their risks, and most of the world agrees about the need to take precautions against the threats posed. The specific tools and techniques that exist to evaluate and measure AI systems for their inclusiveness, fairness, explainability, privacy, safety and other trustworthiness issues — called in the report collectively AI governance tools – can improve such issues. While some AI governance tools provide reassurance to the public and to regulators, the tools too often lack meaningful oversight and quality assessments. Incomplete or ineffective AI governance tools can create a false sense of confidence, cause unintended problems, and generally undermine the promise of AI systems. The report contains rich background details, use cases, potential solutions to the problems discussed in the report, and a global index of AI Governance Tools.
National IDs Around the World — Interactive map

About this Data Visualization: This interactive map displays the presence...
Report: From the Filing Cabinet to the Cloud: Updating the Privacy Act of 1974

This comprehensive report and proposed bill text is focused on the Privacy Act of 1974, an important and early Federal privacy law that applies to the government sector and some contractors. The Privacy Act was written for the 1970s information era -- an era that was characterized by the use of mainframe computers and filing cabinets. Today's digital information era looks much different than the '70s: smart phones are smarter than the old mainframes, and documents are now routinely digitized and stored and perhaps even analyzed in the cloud, among many other changes. The report focuses on why the Privacy Act needs an update that will bring it into this century, and how that could look and work. This work was written by Robert Gellman, and informed by a two-year multi-stakeholder process.