Kevin Sack of the New York Times reports:
A Social Security Administration shift last year to limit access to its death records amid identity-theft concerns is beginning to hamper a broad swath of research, including federal government assessments of hospital safety and financial industry efforts to spot consumer fraud.
For example, a research group that produces reports on organ-transplant survival rates is facing delays because of extra work required to determine whether patients are still alive. The federal agency that runs Medicare uses the data to determine whether some transplant programs have such poor track records that they should be cut off from government financing.
Read more on Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.