Privacy Policies

General Information

UMC is strongly committed to protecting your personal information. We respect and protect our patients’ information and take steps to protect your medical records and privacy. We offer this information so you will know how to protect yourself.

About Identity Theft

Identity theft is the criminal use of someone else’s personally identifying information to commit fraud or other crimes. Medical identity theft is the criminal use of someone else’s personal information, such as an insurance card, to obtain health care services.

Personally identifying information includes your Social Security number, bank account or credit card number, insurance policy number and other valuable information. The Federal Trade Commission(FTC) estimates that nine million Americans have their identities stolen each year.

Identity thieves could rent an apartment, withdraw funds from your bank account, run up debts, receive medical care or commit crimes using your name. Victims can suffer more than financial losses; they may suffer reputational embarrassments, lose out on job opportunities or be denied loans for education, housing or cards because of negative information on their credit reports. Some victims have been arrested for crimes they did not commit.

Victims of medical identity theft can receive inappropriate medical treatment, exhaust their health insurance benefits, lose life and health insurance coverage and fail pre-employment screening exams when their health records contain diseases or conditions that belong to the thief.

Similar to financial identity theft, there are cases where family members and friends assume the identity of an individual to take advantage of the victim’s health insurance benefits.

There are many ways identity theft can occur:

• Stealing–a thief may steal your wallet or purse that contains your credit cards or drivers license. Thieves may also steal your mail looking for bank or credit card statements, new checks, tax information or your personnel records.
• Dumpster diving–thieves dig through trash looking for bills, receipts or statements you threw away.
• Phishing or pretexting–thieves use false pretenses to lure into releasing private information about your financial accounts or your Social Security number that they can then use to pretend to be you.
• Skimming–Thieves can insert devices into card readers and steal your number when you swipe your credit or debit card.
• Address changes–thieves can divert your mail by filing a change of address with the post office.
• Searching–thieves look for public information on internet sources to obtain your personal information.

Request a copy of your medical records from each health care provider and review for errors, such as treatment or medications you never received.If you find errors, contact your provider to have the information corrected. Always shred documents containing any personally identifying information. And use only cross-cut shredders. There are cases where thieves have pieced documents together from single cut shredders.

Unfortunately, there is a great deal of action you must take when you discover you are a victim of identity theft. The first step is to file a police report with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. You are encouraged to obtain the Nevada Attorney General’s Identity Theft card as well.

For More Information

The Joint Commission

Joint Commission policy forbids UMC from taking retaliatory actions against employees, physicians or from adversely affecting treatment or access of any individual for having reported quality of care concerns to the Commission.You may contact the Joint Commission at this toll free U.S. telephone number, 8:30 a.m.to 5:00 p.m., Central Time, weekdays, 800.994.6610.