With fraud and abuse widely considered a major contributor to U.S. health care costs, Verisys will integrate AddressWatch's suspect address data with its FACIS data records of known fraudulent addresses to create one of the largest high-risk address databases available.

"I know of no other source as robust as AddressWatch for identifying risky addresses," said John P. Benson, chief operating officer of Verisys. "Adding AddressWatch's data on suspect addresses to more than 17 years of data Verisys has gathered on federal and state sanctions and disciplinary actions will significantly enhance our clients' ability to reduce fraud losses and limit fraud management costs."

Specifically, using AddressWatch will help Verisys' customers in the following ways:

• Health insurers and claims paying software vendors can more accurately identify claims that merit a fraud investigation, either pre- or post- adjudication;
• Medicare and other fraud contractors can expect more opportunities with higher potential for recoveries;
• Pharmacy Benefits Managers (PBM) and claims clearinghouses can better avoid mailing prescription drugs to bogus addresses, improving product differentiation and customer satisfaction with improved fraud management; and
• Hospital customers and front-end revenue cycle vendors can improve compliance with FTC's Red Flags Rule and enhance their identity theft prevention capabilities.

AddressWatch data includes addresses for phone answering services, check-cashing stores, commercial mail receiving agencies, virtual offices, mail forwarding services, USPS physical street addresses, prisons, hotels, known-fraud addresses and other addresses that may be used as fronts for fraud. The data also includes predictive risk scoring, which measures how risky an address may be.

"AddressWatch has been a trusted source for active, prospective fraud prevention in the financial services industry for 25 years," said Adam Elliott, President of ID Insight. "By combining AddressWatch with the data that Verisys provides, it's our hope that the health care industry can progress towards the same type of proactive, real-time fraud prevention that the financial industry now employs."

Under the terms of the transaction, Verisys has acquired all title, rights and interest in AddressWatch and will apply its expertise in primary source data aggregation to further extend the accuracy and completeness of AddressWatch data. ID Insight will continue to market AddressWatch in the financial sector, with their clients benefiting from Verisys' data contribution and heritage in primary source data aggregation.