Cookeville Regional Patients Receiving Scam Calls In The Hospital Rooms

Patients admitted to rooms at Cookeville Regional Medical Center have increasingly been receiving scam calls.

The scammers call rooms impersonating hospital staff and try to get patients to reveal personal information such as social security numbers and dates of birth. CRMC Chief Information Officer Tim McDermott said the practice has increased in recent months.

“We actually don’t reach out to patients directly in the room,” McDermott said. “We will go see them in person to gather some of that information. But unfortunately, I think there has been some occurrences where patients have given out information to someone, and it wasn’t us.”

McDermott said he does not want calls to go through the operator, because it will make it harder for families to contact their injured and sick loved ones. McDermott said the hospital put itself on the National Do-Not-Call Registry and are having their service provider filter out potential scam calls.

Because the calls cannot be traced, McDermott said there is not much more that can be done.

“Me, personally, on my cell phone, I’ll get calls all the time from companies or telemarketing agencies, and it would appear to be a local phone number coming through on my phone because they are masking the number,” McDermott said. “That’s the same type of thing that’s going on. There’s not really a good way to trace that back to somebody.”

McDermott said the only other thing he can do to combat these calls is to warn potential patients.

“We’re trying to educate the public to let them know what they could experience if they are here, to try and prevent them from giving that information,” McDermott said.

McDermott said it is upsetting that these scammers have targeted CRMC hospital rooms.

“Trying to take advantage of somebody at their worst time is not good,” McDermott said.